For the geeks and not-so-geeks among us, these are possible scenarios whereby someone could have sniffed out passwords from a wireless network. I wonder if there was WiFi access at the recent S’pore Blog Conf and if that’s how XX got hacked. Still, prevention is better than cure – I just don’t trust using public WiFi without doing some fancy security sh*t to my laptop first. And that’s too tedious – I’ll just go home instead. ;)

*) There is all sorts of games that are played upon the wireless network. Fake access points go up and down. Rogue DHCP servers answer to requests. The routers get hammered with DoS attacks.

*) Expect weird DHCP and DNS stuff to happen.

*) Finally, try to recall all of the attacks you have seen in the last year and dismissed because the attacker needed to be local to your network. Then realize that you are about to connect to that network.


Complete list of tips and preventions for when using public WiFi are here.