More on internet frauds/scams

Today we are going to look at wireless security. I am sure most of you with laptop/notebook have brought it to internet cafes. You might even have a wireless access point at home. By using wireless technology you are often more targeted by hackers. Yes; I am referring to black hat hacker; those illegal kind. And I do position them as internet scammers. And it’s not really hard to do these things if you have some kind of computer knowledge, and know a bit about what kind of software is out there. The attacks you are most exposed for by scammers are of course packet sniffing, false DHCP servers and key loggers. It’s easy to assume you are safe using wireless networks around; hi; they are even have encryption protocols like WEP etc. Well; don’t feel too safe. Scammers know how to easily sniff up to packages to encrypt the package steam. Once the data steam is decrypted it’s not too hard to attack you computer. Neither is it really hard to set up a fake access point, and steal your cookies. Of course I am not referring to does sweet cookies you are eating; but the cookies you use when you log into places. They could easily use them to access any sites you are using without needing your password at all. So how do you secure yourself from these scammers? I only have one answer that might help you some; of course there are no definitive answers to protect yourself from internet scammers, but do some research on Virtual Private Networks (VPN). I am not using windows all the time; and know maybe more about openVPN; but I think it’s fairly simple to put up a VPN network on windows these days too. If you set up a decent VPN server, or even pay some trusted VPN services you will have all your internet traffic encrypted. Meaning; even the ISP provider for the internet café know your actions. The traffic between the VPN server and the ISP server will still be decrypted. VPN basically creates a “tunnel” between your computer and the VPN server. All internet traffic will be encrypted and safer from internet scammers. To buy VPN servers in other countries can even let you surf normal sites in your country. Turkey is an good example here; some court blocked Turkish access to YouTube and various other sites; If a citizen in Turkey were to use a Dutch or British VPN sever they could avoid the blockings similar as they would with a proxy server; except VPN encrypt all internet traffic; not just the browser. I hope this article thought you a bit on how to avoid internet scammers and surf a bit more safely.