Holy cow, this is bad. For those who regularly use Wi-Fi hotspots, there is a new risk to your personal data on the loose. Its name is Firesheep.
More and more of us are using the Web on a daily basis, and many of us use public Wi-Fi hotspots to do so while we’re out and about. The problem is that many of these are unsecured and therefore unsafe.
However, while it’s never been safe to do online banking or shopping over such a network, it’s now also not recommended that you sign into social networking sites either, as a new Firefox add-on could expose you and your account to nefarious people.
This is thanks to Firesheep, a tool released over the weekend that enables anyone to become a hacker of sorts. Once installed people can remotely log in to your account on a number of sites, including Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and WordPress, if you access them via an unsecured network.
The advice is not to use an unsecured network, and if you have to then don’t use any sites that require a login.
