Our tips for keeping your public wifi browsing safe and secure, then we go inside the billion dollar hacking club answer some great questions…

And so much more!

On this week’s episode, of TechSNAP!

Thanks to:

— Show Notes: —

How To Avoid Data Theft When Using Public Wi-Fi

• Wireless routers are inexpensive, require minimal setup, and can cover wide physical areas. Unfortunately, these very properties also make them enticing targets for hackers.
• “The proliferation of public Wi-Fi is one of the biggest threats to consumer data,” says David Kennedy, founder of information security firm TrustedSec.
• The fact that anyone can join the network is what makes it so unsafe,” cautions Matthew Green, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins’ Information Security Institute. ”A password login to join the network might feel reassuring,” he adds, “but if everybody knows the password, that’s no better than not having one at all.”
• One extremely common attack involves a hacker setting up a public Wi-Fi hotspot of their own at your favorite Wi-Fi watering hole. It will likely have a name very similar to the hotspot the legitimate business is offering.
• Before connecting to any hotspot, ask an employee for the shop’s full network name and carefully check that it matches the one you see in your Wi-Fi menu.
• Use SSL
• Use a VPN. Someone snooping on traffic over the Wi-Fi network will just see garbled data passing between your computer or device and this secondary VPN server.

Inside w00w00 (1996-2003), the hacking collective whos members now run much of the Internet

• Tells the inside story of a hacking group that was big back in the early days of the Internet
• “Its online footprint consists almost entirely of the security tools and advisories issued by various participants of the group and media coverage garnered through the discovery of such software exploits”
• The new attention revolves around a reunion, as yet another member of the old crew becomes a billionaire
• Former members include:
  • Jan Koum (WhatsApp)
  • Shawn Fanning (Napster)
  • Sean Parker (Napster, Facebook)
  • Matt Conover (CloudVolumes)
• Dug Song (Duo Security and Arbor Networks)
• Michael A. Davis (CounterTack)
• David McKay (Google and AdMob)
• Josha Bronson (Yammer)
• Joshua J. Drake (Accuvant Labs)
• Andrew Reiter (Veracode)
• Simon Roses Femerling (Microsoft Research)
• Gordon Fyodor Lyon (creator of Nmap Security Scanner)
• Adam O’Donnell (Immunet)
• Mark Dowd (Azimuth Security)
• Tim Yardley (researcher in critical infrastructure security)
  • Other members now work at: Cloudmark, Duo Security, Hotmail, Google, Symantec, SecurityFocus, and Sourcefire
• “We felt the world was ours to take,” says Anthony Zboralski, who is currently founder and CEO of Belua. “We were young, smart, ambitious and crazy; we could do things that few people thought were possible. A lot of us had a ferocious sense of entitlement.”

Feedback:

• HIPAA Compliancy

• ipv6, NAT and another random question

• FreeNAS services fail to start after reboot

• my disquiet with hypervisor farms

• Online hacking platform

Round Up:

• Security researchers uncover three-year-old \’RUSSIAN SPYware\’
• What the Internet actually looks like, where the cables are
• Steve Ballmer Blew Up At the Microsoft Board Before Retiring
• Researcher adds fake FBI and Secret Service offices to google maps with his phone number, intercepts calls
• OnLive is back with a $14.99 plan to stream your Steam games anywhere
• How attackers spread, and how to stop them – Mark Russinovich
• Would BCP (Best Current Practises) 38 really solve all DDoS?
• Why CPP (common point of purchase) fraud analysis does not always work
• Mozilla announces new advanced JPEG library, combined libjpeg-turbo and jpgcrush with additional improvements while maintaining support for existing decoders