You come to to your college campus hostel room day and you find your dean, and c yber

cops standing on door. Well why ? Someone gave a tip-off that you re storing illegal CREDIT card information / Terrorist information on your email. You re sure that you didn t indulge in any such activity and try to prove that by showing you r email inbox and machine. Alas, you find that there are several files that cont ain database of stolen Credit cards, etc. Well, hey, you ve been using hard to gue ss passwords ( after all that s a tip every security guy gives), you keep a latest Antivirus software + Firewall to keep your machine Hacker Safe. But, that s not your machine that s a network where the boundries of all those inst alled hacker-safe tools is render You have been using hard-to-guess passwords and changing them regularly. How cou ld someone have gotten access to your account to use it for this activity? One l ikely possibility is that you have been a victim of a password sniffer attack. You re online and reading this posts, via internet, which is by concept a network of wire meshes. By principle is WiFi too is nothing but a wireless version of th e same wired network topology- which inadvertendly is vulnerable. Whether you re s ubscribed to the local cable internet walah, or a LAN inside your office you mig ht be totalled. The problem is that we feel installing a good updated antivirus or firewall will protect us from the malicious hackers. That s nothing but an illusion, a false se nse of security. The whole point is about understanding the basics that lie behind the TCP/IP pro tocol. All the network data can be seen as packets flowing around which can be s nooped. Take for example an experiment I did yesterday, I ran up a sniffer program in th e Windows environ to see what might be flowing through my Local Area Network. No t much to surprise , the passwords could easily be seen travelling in plaintext. Checkout this image1 One can intercept chat conversations at will. Google Talk, MSN , Yahoo,Rediff In dia do not use SSL or any encryption to secure the Chat conversations. So your a morous private conversation with your girlfriend, or serious ones with business affiliates might be just seen in plain by a malicious attacker sitting somewhere in the Local Area Network. All IITs, and college campuses employ LANs to distri bute internet among, which by principle is not a safe environment. Checkout this image: You may see the passwords of users :ajay , prafull etc I do no t know them since they might be sitting in some part of my Local LAN in my resid ential area. But I have their passwords. Common FAQ that might arise after reading this short piece of text: Q: Am I safe doing my business transactions via internet on LAN ? A: Quite safe as of now. All the leading Internet transations are facilitated us ing CRYPTOGRAPHY embedded in their webpages. Security certificates and SSL is a good protection from getting sniffed in the LAN environs. Q: Does my latest firewall, or antivirus protect me agaist such type of attacks? A: Heck, no! Firewalls are only good when it comes to inbound attack security. T he hacker might not be able to intrude your machine, or send viruses/trojans. Fi rewalls/AVs are defunct after the data escapes your machine and enters the Netwo rk, any snooping eye can catch hold of it.

Q: Any protections? A: 100 percent security comes when you plug off your wires. For now make sure yo u use secure logins. (the ones having a https in front, to ensure your data is b eing encrypted. When a hacker gathers encrypted data, its generally useless for him, unless he t akes the pain to demystify the key by using BRUTEFORCE and Dictionary type attac ks. Very few crackers adopt this, due to the amount of time involved in complex mathematical attacks. Well you