I thought I’d create a separate post for this. As I mentioned, someone took over my gmail account while I was at SM City Manila. The hacker erased all of my emails and sent vulgar chat messages to one of my friends.
I use a Mac, so knew this was not caused by some kind of virus.
I discovered this was a Sidejack attack. Here’s a helpful video:
So here a few precautions I’d recommend for using WiFi at public places:
1. Use a secure page option when checking your mail. Secure pages begin with https:// (note the “s” at the end of the http).
2. You can change the settings in your gmail to always use a secure connection. Just go to your settings and find this:
3. My google page is my homepage, which automatically comes up anytime I open Firefox. I changed the settings to a secure version of igoogle, and you may want to do the same:
4. Be very careful about using Twitter, FaceBook, forums, and other non-secure websites when using public wifi.
I’m still going to use wifi at the mall. If I just stopped using it altogether, the idiot hacker wins.
Want to warn others? Just use the “add this” button below to re-post this article to your twitter, facebook, etc.
This is extremely useful, KKevin! Thanks! 🙂
Thanks for this.
Didn’t know you could do that, the gmail setting.
thanks.
that is for gmail how about others like facebook a, twitter, forums etc?
FaceBook, Twitter, etc, would not be secure and would be very vulnerable to this type of attack.
The only way to securely use them on public wifi would be to have some kind of virtual private network (VPN) service.
Hi, do you think this apply too when browsing thru phones???
I’m not really sure. You may want to do some research and find out.
Such a great information and I’ve been looking for this..