\nDavid Ferrara, Las Vegas Review-Journal \u00b7 May 5, 2014 at 7:03 pm<\/p>\n
\tPeople tend to shed their inhibitions in Sin City even when Internet privacy is concerned.<\/p>\n
\tNearly half the Wi-Fi users on the Strip this weekend logged on with little or no regard for their protection, a cybersecurity expert found. Thousands of users didn\u2019t seem to consider the security of the networks or what they were viewing, which included everything from adult pages to banking sites.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cIt\u2019s the kind of behaviors you might attribute with tourists having a Vegas blowout,\u201d said James Lyne, global head of security at the British firm Sophos.<\/p>\n
\tRiding his specially modified bicycle up and down Las Vegas Boulevard and in other business and financial areas of the Valley, Lyne found 56,198 networks, and 47.39 percent of those networks had no security encryption. A little less than 3 percent of those networks used Wired Equivalent Privacy, a security system that is considered to be easily compromised. Las Vegas fared well when compared with other cities that use that system, he said.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cThere was a real appeal to seeing what people would browse in one of the most entertaining cities in the world,\u201d Lyne said.<\/p>\n
\tAnother 30 percent of networks used Wi-Fi Protected Access, which Lyne also considers vulnerable.<\/p>\n
\tHe spent six hours \u201cwar biking\u201d Friday and Saturday to scan for wireless networks. Then, he set up a phony wireless hot spot on the Strip for an additional three hours.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cWhat was clear was just how easy it would be for attackers to secretly join Wi-Fi networks all over the city and directly attack computers or devices to steal money or information,\u201d Lyne said.<\/p>\n
\tHis company wants to raise awareness about Internet security as more and more people use mobile devices to go online.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cWe need to fix the gap between convenience and security,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\tLyne expected a breadth of open networks on the Strip because of all the resorts, but was concerned to find that people rarely took steps to protect their own security when accessing the networks.<\/p>\n
\tLyne said he didn\u2019t intercept or store any sensitive information and trashed all the data when he completed the study.<\/p>\n
\tOther popular sites visited on insecure networks in Las Vegas: Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.<\/p>\n
\tMore than 4,700 people connected to the hot spot Lyne created, compared with about 2,900 people in London and more than 1,500 in San Francisco during similar studies. His next planned stops: New York, Hanoi, Sydney and Tokyo.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cIt\u2019s like shouting your personal or company information out of the nearest window and being surprised when someone abuses it,\u201d he said. \u201cIt would have been trivial to attack nearly everyone in the study.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cWe were ethical, but that doesn\u2019t mean the next person coming along with that readily available kit will be,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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David Ferrara, Las Vegas Review-Journal \u00b7 May 5, 2014 at 7:03 pm People tend to shed their inhibitions in Sin City even when Internet privacy is concerned. Nearly half the Wi-Fi users on the Strip this weekend logged on with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-casino-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}