Have you heard of Firesheep? Wicked Hacking all Your Accounts.

[Gerry]

I was looking on WebMonkey for some updates.

I came across an article regarding a FireFox add-on called Firesheep.

You have got to read this yourself:

Earlier this year, the Firefox add-on Firesheep created quite a controversy by making it easy to capture unencrypted web traffic.

Firesheep sniffs unencrypted cookies sent across open wi-fi networks. That means anyone with Firesheep installed can watch your browsing sessions while you lounge at Starbucks and grab your log-in credentials for Facebook, Twitter or other popular sites. Armed with those credentials, anyone using Firesheep can essentially masquerade as you all over the web, logging in to other social sites, blogs and news sites using your Facebook or Twitter username and password.

None of Firesheep’s mechanisms are new. But Firesheep made sniffing web traffic point-and-click simple — it was suddenly dead easy to do something that used to require a good bit of hacking knowledge.

More...

The reason I bring this up, there have been quite a few members starting threads about accounts being hacked, someone getting their user names, and using their passwords in various accounts.

I never knew this (Firesheep) existed. Carrying around an iPad or a smartphone, I can always connect to an internet somewhere. But I'll stay with my own wifi connection with my smartphone hotspot.

 

[tekz999]

Thanks for the heads up. Firesheep eats firefox for breakfast, very ironic.

 

[ksinclair]

Is it really that easy? I never heard of this. Its scary! Will this be blocked?

And what does it mean "But I'll stay with my own wifi connection with my smartphone hotspot" ???

 

[Gerry]

Is it really that easy? I never heard of this. Its scary! Will this be blocked?

And what does it mean "But I'll stay with my own wifi connection with my smartphone hotspot" ???

Yes, read the article to find the defensive add-on for this.

As for the smartphone, I have the Google Nexus One running the Android OS. Update 2.2 included the capability to make my phone my own WiFi Hot Spot. As long as I have a telephone signal, I have internet access anywhere I go for free. It is pretty slick. I can take my iPad anywhere and simply log on to the internet using the phone as the WiFi hotspot.

---------- Post added at 01:07 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:05 AM ----------

The best way to protect yourself from Firesheep is simply avoid connecting to unencrypted sites when you’re on an open wi-fi network. That means making sure that you connect over HTTPS rather than HTTP everywhere you surf. But sadly, doing so is complicated and depends on which site you’re trying to connect to.

That’s where the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s HTTPS Everywhere Firefox add-on comes in. The extension makes it easy to ensure you’re connecting to secure sites by rewriting all requests to an HTTPS URL whenever you visit one of the sites it supports.

 

[ksinclair]

is there a link to an article?

---------- Post added at 10:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:15 PM ----------

What about IE and Firefox, and Safari, and Opera?

 

[Gerry]

is there a link to an article?

Look in the first post for the big MORE button.