Are you playing games like Starcraft 2, WoW or CS on Steam? Are you worried someone might steal your Steam or Blizzard account details via Firesheep? If so, read this guide to learn how to protect yourself.
What is Firesheep?
What is Firesheep? Firesheep by Eric Butler can be downloaded from http://codebutler.com/ and is a firefox extension that allows people to infiltrate any busy open Wifi connection and connect to YOUR facebook account or any service you are currently using while you are connected to the Wifi network.
Let’s say you are visiting an internet café regularly and you sometimes visit Facebook there, then someone might steal your account data and much much more with the help of Firesheep.
Serious security problems require serious attention
Eric Butler is trying to address a very serious problems. Many sites may encyrpt your password, but not your cookies. Let’s say you get the cookie of someone’s Facebook account, then you can do whatever you want because technically you are logged into the account with a valid cookie.
How to protect yourself?
Do you rely on open Wifi connections? Do you need them a lot because you travel a lot or play with your friends over open Wifi connections in your local internet café? If so, you can protect yourself quite easily.
VPN connections allow you to connect to the internet through a private and secure connection. You basically don’t connect directly to the internet, instead all the traffic will be handled by the VPN connection. That’s also how you can get a US IP without having an actual US internet connection (useful to watch ABC.com, Hulu or to use any service restricted to US IP’s).
We previously reported about free VPN service providers and also paid service providers and a secure gaming VPN provider.
