UK Wireless Hotspots are Vulnerable to Hacking

BBC’s consumer affairs program Watchdog covered the security of broadband hotspots last night and found that three of the most used hotspots in the country: BT Openzone , The Cloud and T-mobile are all vulnerable to hacking attacks, with a security firm stating that there has been an increase in ‘account takeover fraud’ by 207% in the last year.

Watchdog then demonstrated this by using equipment available online in order to hijack the traffic at a mixture of hotspots.

All three of the main providers have responded to the program, letting people know that they all follow the standard protocols for UK Wi-Fi and all have suggested using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) in order to secure their data online, although this is a solution that is likely to confuse more casual internet users than it’s likely to help anyone.

If you can, try to make sure to use WPA2 encryption on your network and keep your passkey as long as possible to make it much more difficult to crack. However, it’s ultimately down to the provider – if they don’t provide WPA2 support the best you can do is complain to them in writing.

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