by Security in any network is a very important topic, what many don’t realize is how they put their personal data in jeopardy everyday because they assume their Internet activity is secure.
There are multiple levels of security in a typical network, but is this enough to protect your data? Unfortunately, it’s not, there are things that the user needs to do to make sure their accounts remain safe.
To coin a phrase; If you leave the barn door open, you should expect to get rats.
Important Guidelines you should follow:
- Always access your web hosting logins through a secure connection. (SFTP/SSH/SSL)
- Always access your email through a secure connection.
- Always access the web control through a secure connection. (https rather than http)
How Hackers Work:
The most common way a hacker can gather data is by placing a packet sniffer on a network in promiscuous mode; a malicious intruder can then capture and analyze all the network traffic. Within a given network, username and password, information is generally transmitted in clear text (unsecured) which means that the information would be viewable by analyzing the packets being transmitted.
A packet sniffer can only capture packet information within any given subnet its run from. So basically someone in your local ISPs network can easily run a packet sniffer, which can be downloaded free, and capture login information for anyone who is accessing sites not using secure connections.
Detecting rogue packet sniffers on a network is not an easy task. By its very nature, the sniffer is passive. It simply captures the packets that are traveling to the network interface it is monitoring. That means there is generally no signature or erroneous traffic to look for that would identify a machine running a packet sniffer.
There are more aggressive ways a malicious intruder can get into a system, but the most common and easiest to accomplish is this method. Anyone can just decide one day; they want to be a malicious, do a quick search in Google, and they can be sniffing packets in their local ISP’s network in a few minutes.
This is why it’s very important to take precautions and always use a secure connection when transmitting any type of data you don’t want seen by other!
