You who carry your laptop with you everywhere and connect to any available Wi-Fi, and you who the first thing you ask for in a coffee shop is the Wi-Fi password and not your coffee, should know that these habits lead you to the jaws of...a hacker!
The reason you're so vulnerable to attacks when you connect to public Wi-Fi? T-Mobile and AT&T, the largest providers of Wi-Fi Hotspots in coffee shops, bookstores, hotels, and airports worldwide, don't require encryption of data traveling wirelessly between laptops and the internet.
"If you're using public Wi-Fi and haven't been hacked yet, it's simply because there's no one around who wouldn't be bored doing it," says Robert Graham, CEO of Errata Security Consulting.
Wi-Fi eavesdropping is a constant problem for security experts. Anyone with a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop can download free Wi-Fi monitoring programs. A sound recorder can reach up to 100 meters away and monitor what you do online.
Although there are no estimates of how often such breaches occur, given that no one has been arrested for breaching public Wi-Fi, there are hundreds of public Hotspots, so there will certainly be many who have attempted a hack.
"Wi-Fi hot-hacks are happening. We may not see them, but they live among us," said Tom Brennan, security consultant at Access IT Group.
It should be noted that according to expert estimates, 95% of Wi-Fi data traffic is not encrypted.
