SEOMike - 1:49 pm on Aug 6, 2008 (gmt 0)

I have a great little hardware firewall made by a company called Yoggie. It's a small USB device that is a self contained computer with it's own processor and Linux OS. When I was at SMX Advanced in Seattle I was amazed at how many attempts were made to access my computer while sitting in a session. There were over 400 attempts recorded within the first few minutes of turning it on.

It's amazing how many places have unsecured wireless access. A lot of smaller companies will often just have WEP encryption which is very easily broken. There used to be something called the worldwide wardrive and people would go out and drive around to sniff out wireless networks and list their level of security. It was amazing to see how many businesses had open wireless networks.

I was watching a show a few months back and it was talking about coffee shop wireless networks. The guy they were interviewing had a sweet Mac laptop and the software he was using was allowing him to capture all the traffic from users on the wireless. He could capture their passwords and watch their internet traffic (even HTTPS) just like it was him that was surfing. No firewall can protect you from that!