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Worried About Nasties On Public Wi-Fi? This Map Might Help You Avoid Hackers

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It should be apparent to all internet users today: public Wi-Fi spots can’t be trusted. With so many people sitting on the same network - some potentially with malicious ideas, others without adequate levels of protection - it’s often trivial for hackers to spy on others, especially where those running the things aren’t doing so responsibly.

Many suspected spy agencies to be abusing such networks and over the last year the NSA files have confirmed those suspicions. Criminals often roam the streets too, looking to hoover up data where they can.

But there’s no doubt the thousands of public Wi-Fi networks in cafes, pubs and shopping malls are incredibly useful. When there’s no data left to suck up from your phone contract, these services can be life savers (or at least handy for finding the most expeditious route home).

Over in Tel-Aviv, young mobile security company SkyCure has created a map highlighting where the company believes threats are lurking on public Wi-FI. Yair Amit, CTO and co-founder at SkyCure, explained to me over email that the source of the information for the map comes from devices on which the company’s technology sits, meaning there are likely many more threats lurking elsewhere. But it's useful nonetheless.

Whenever SkyCure users log onto a network, selected security-related data is fed into the firm’s Crowd Wisdom engine, which is feeding the map right now.

“Regarding the nature of the incidents: when you see an incident marker on the map, it means that Skycure has identified concrete network behavior that endangers personal or business data of devices that connect to the network - these can target the OS level, app level or protocol level,” Amit added.

“We do not count open networks in this list and do not enter them to the [database] unless they exhibit concrete bad behavior.

“Being on the map can mean a variety of things: it can be a result of a malicious and rogue network, but it can also be a result of attackers (or devices that have malware running on them) that are connected to the same network at a specific given time, or improper configuration of Wi-Fi networks that might expose business data for unaware device owners.”

The map’s main flaw is that it doesn’t offer technical details of the identified incidents for each network, but Amit said this may be added in the future.

And as useful as it might be, this map won’t help solve the underlying problem here: security on public Wi-Fi is still largely dreadful. When security firm Sophos carried out a test across UK and US cities, including London and San Francisco, it found over a third had bad security practices. Between 5% and 9% used the “incredibly ancient” WEP protocol, which is supposed to protect people’s data but is easily broken.

As head of research at Sophos James Lyne told me earlier this year, “we need a fundamentally better way of handling open wireless networks”. “We need a new standard for wireless for cafes, hotels and other such public spaces.”