Be cautious, but not paranoid, about WiFi snoops.
The professional hackers are in it for money, and are looking for credit card numbers, passwords to financial sites, and that sort of thing. They don’t give a damn about anything they can’t use to get money immediately, and are likely just to be collecting data to mine with filters that identify potentially profitable data rather than reading everything they collect.
On that matter, most financial and e-commerce sites use secure connections (
https://) for any login or financial transaction – which encrypts data from the device to the server - so even if someone snoops your wifi session, what they get is encrypted. I don’t hesitate to bank or purchase over wifi with a secure connection.
On the other hand, there are the amateurs who are in it for other reasons – mischief mostly – and I expect a teenage prankster might be very interested if he was able to harvest a username/password to an adult-oriented site. He’d get in, snoop around, screw with your account, play “jokes” that could harm your reputation, and maybe even see if he could blackmail you if there’s any personal information in your profile – all for kicks.
In an airport, that’s not likely to happen – only ticketed passengers past security, so unless there’s some shifty-looking kid around acting strangely and trying to hide his screen, chances are there’s nobody there that would worry you. Hotels, Starbucks, and other public locations, particularly if they are crowded, are more of a concern – but even so, the chances seem pretty slim. Not impossible, but not likely.
It would be great if eccie would enable secure connections – the cost of a certificate and switching on secure https protocols are pretty low, and I think we’d all feel a little more at ease – maybe one of the admins could mention it to the sysop as a nice-to-have?
