How not to get hacked: Are you safe online? by Harsh Maurya

Author:Harsh Maurya [Maurya, Harsh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-11-21T23:00:00+00:00

Getting hacked – Wi-Fi sniffing

You went to a popular restaurant for dinner with a friend. The food is taking time to reach your table. You and your friend hang out so much that you have nothing much to talk and you both are just busy playing with your mobiles. Suddenly you realize that it is the last day for paying your electricity bill. The restaurant offers free Wi-Fi. What a good luck you have today, right? So you instantly paid your electricity bill online using the restaurant’s free Wi-Fi and thereafter checked in your Facebook status – having dinner with my best friend at ***. Oh wait, the food has also come and it looks tasty as hell. What a fine night you are having. So the two of you enjoy every bit of slice and discuss how easy life has become after the advent of technology and after everything has become available online these days.

The next morning, you wake up from the bed and check your phone for missed whatsapp messages when suddenly you see this text:

“$ 10,000 has been successfully transferred from your bank account ****** to the account xxxxxxxx. Available balance: $12.45”

You are instantly shocked to see this. All your savings from past year just vanished in thin year. You decide to call the police but they suggest you should rather contact the cybercrime department. After a long struggle of six months, you give up the chase. Apparently the hacker was very smart and cops are not able to snatch him or at least it appears so.

What went wrong here? This can really happen to any of us. It is the human tendency to take things for granted which never happened to him/her. But really if we work so hard to earn money, why not be a little careful to protect it. That is the least we could do. To explain what exactly happened in this scenario and how to prevent it from

happening, let us understand how it all works.

Wi-Fi has become a very common technology used by millions of people to access the internet. However potential loopholes in the underlying technology has left a lot of room for the hackers to attack and exploit the wireless networks. Please note that securing a Wi-Fi setup is a topic on its own and I am not going to cover it here since it requires some technical skills and is outside the scope of this book. Still in one liner I would like to comment to those people who have set-up a Wi-Fi network (not the users), to follow some basic guidelines, like using WPA and WPA2, not using WEP, not broadcasting the name of the network etc.

For a normal user who just uses a Wi-Fi

connection to gain access to internet, here is a fact: everything you do over a Wi-Fi network is completely unsecure if you are not taking special measures to secure it. Basically, any user who is connected to the same Wi-Fi network as yours can sniff your data and use it for his advantage.

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