Page 448 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

Recommendations
 Attention should be paid to the surrounding area when accessing hotspots, in order to verify
that nobody is able to read one's laptop screen. A privacy screen can be used for extra security.
 The network configuration should be changed in order to manually select each wireless
network that the system joins.

 File sharing should be turned off while at a hotspot. Highly sensitive or personal data should
be stored elsewhere, and when using instant messaging or e‐mail, nothing should be sent that
one would not want made public.

 There exist products that enable users to become “invisible” on the network by creating a
virtual private network (VPN). These products encrypt the username, password and other
confidential information that users may have entered online, allowing the users to control
what they share online, no matter where they connect to the Internet. Internet banking, stock
trading or other sensitive online financial transactions should be avoided while using a public
hotspot.
 Security software should be kept current and active.

These Internet hotspots can be a virtual playground for beginning hackers or a potential gold mine
for sophisticated veteran cybercriminals, as illustrated in Box 2.

Box 2. How do cybercriminals exploit WiFi hotspots?

Packet sniffers are programs that allow the interception of wireless transmissions via data
packets. If the packets are unencrypted, someone with a packet sniffer can see information like
personal communications, financial transactions and account passwords as plain text.

Wi‐phishing, or The evil twin, is a process in which a cybercriminal pre‐empts the hotspot's
wireless signal with one of his own, spoofs the legitimate network name, and replaces the sign‐
up page with one that looks like the real thing. As a result, credit card and other personal
information can be supplied to the spoofer, rather than the hotspot provider.

 Firesheep is a free add‐on application created for the Firefox browser that wraps a friendly
interface around a hacker's tool, allowing cybercriminals to “side jack” or intercept login
credentials for a site or service that does not require a secure socket layer (SSL) (a security
feature that provides encryption).

It is critical that free Wi‐Fi hotspots in SSC, whether provided by private entities like shops or by the
city administration itself, are secured.

438 ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications