Posted on May 15th, 2009

Internet café nightmare.

I could not believe this, as I’m very careful when I get online and especially on wifi spots or networks that I don’t know as I knew people could see my machine there, but not actually steal information from it. Was I ever mistaken.

A Day out of the office at the coffee shop

The day started with me foregoing the drearyness of the office and instead working from a local internet café. I sat there surfing away and I was chatting on various instant message programs, logged into my bank account and uploaded pictures to my favorite social networking site, so people could comment on them.

A 15 year old hacker had my personal and private information

After about an hour or so a camera crew walked into the café along with a reporter carrying his microphone asking questions to customers. I couldn't really hear what was going on and then after a few minuets I was shocked to find out that this crew had a 15 year old hacker in their van outside that had been snooping everyone’s computer in the café.
The interviewer started spouting off some peoples names and people in the café were saying, hey that’s me.

I’m ok, I have a firewall…WRONG.

I was thinking there is no way my name was going to come up as I have a paid for a software firewall on my computer and I’m safe, but then the shock came, my name was called and I raised my hand and walked over to the guy.

He said to me, so Phil let us tell you a bit about what you have been doing.

A list of everything I do online, is this possible?

Here is a list of the sites you went to, and I looked at the screen it it had all the history of where i had been visiting in the last hour. I couldn't believe what I was seeing on his screen.

The feeling of being Violated online

Then I noticed it did not just contain that, he had all my username and passwords for all the sites I had logged into, further more all my instant message conversations were also logged and I was in complete shock and felt violated.

Was it possible to find out how to prevent this?

I was curious on how to prevent this from happening to me in the real world so I asked them what solutions were out there to protect against this sort of attack They suggested that the café should invest in a few pieces of hardware that would protect their customers, but they are expensive and if they are not set up correctly they are just as open as nothing at all. The easiest solution was that I purchase a 3rd party product that would protect me.

At this point I was still not clear what would protect me fully online and then a friend told me to try a secure private network like ProXPN.

 

 

So what solution did I end up going with?

After much research on the subject of internet security and privacy solutions I settled on proXPN.com for several reasons, most of which included the level of encryption and ease of use.
After a 2 minute sign up process I had instant access to the members area with my setup instructions. Fast forward 2 more minutes and I had it completely set up on my laptop. Now you know I don't generally pitch products but proXPN does the same for internet securty that broadband over dial up did for the internet.

 

Other Identity theft stories

When I was researching how common online identity theft is I came across all of these news stories as well. Its simply amazing how common it is, yet how little we do to protect ourselves against it.

 

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/idtheft/video/avoid-identity-theft-video.html

 

 

 

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/05/18/identity.theft/index.html