The article discusses security issues which affect Wi-Fi – a popular wireless standard widely used to access local area networks and the Internet.
Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management systems, presents a new analytical article written by Christian Funk, a Kaspersky Lab malware analyst in Central Europe. The article discusses security issues which affect Wi-Fi – a popular wireless standard widely used to access local area networks and the Internet.
The author describes Wi-Fi-related threats, their possible consequences and protection measures, as well as an alternative method of wireless access – UMTS, a 3G mobile telecommunication technology.
Summer is here, and more and more users are heading off on vacation and using public Wi-Fi access points to get online. This offers a number of advantages, such as independence from mobile phone companies, but also poses a threat to the integrity and confidentiality of the information being transferred.
According to the author, Wi-Fi networks are vulnerable to so-called man-in-the-middle attacks, in which cybercriminals hijack the communication channel and gain full access to the information transferred. Such attacks may target logins and passwords, credit card data or other confidential information.
Christian Funk believes that using a VPN-secure-connection">Virtual Private Network (VPN) is an effective method of encrypting and tunneling Wi-Fi data. Travelers who do not have a home or corporate VPN server may want to make use of the VPN-secure-connection">VPN services that are now widely available.
The author also discusses an alternative to Wi-Fi Internet access – UMTS, a 3G mobile telecommunication technology which supports optimized authentication algorithms. Its coverage in some European cities reaches 90% of the territory, while pricing is quite competitive.
The Kaspersky Lab expert emphasizes the importance of installing an effective integrated protection system on the computer, which includes a firewall and an application activity filter in addition to an virus scanner.
The full version of Christian Funk’s article is available on Viruslist.com. A summary of the article is available on Kaspersky Lab’s corporate site.
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