Tuesday, October 26, 2010

The "Firesheep" add-on!

If you are one of the people that surf the net without logging out of, lets use Facebook as an example, then this article is very important to read.

What is Firesheep?

Firesheep is a Mozilla add-on that allows anyone to hijack other people's social network accounts in open WiFi zones.

How this application works is actually very simple. When you log in to a site, you get a session cookie to keep you logged in, this is usually turned on by the "Remember Me" button).

By that cookie you will be automatically identified as the one logged into the site so that you don't need to identify yourself again. So then Firesheep allows it's user to "steal" your cookie and with that your session and then they can do anything and access anything that you can on the site...scary isn't it?

Even scarier is that any person, or idiot, can use Firesheep. There is a list of sites that firesheep can hijack such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, Foursquare, Windows live, Cisco, Flicker, bit.ly and so many more.

So now you are probably wondering how you will be able to Stop this from happening to you?

Well, always use an encrypted WiFi when using one. Then you can demand a SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) network, this provides secure communications over the Internet, your company has a responsibility to protect you against these kind of threats

For our range of Networking solutions contact iVolve Technologies (Pty) Ltd