Cyber cafes
I have been on the road for over a month now, and during this time, the only sensible way to connect while in India has been through cybercafes.
A small place with cubicles crammed into uncomfortable positions — the mouse on desk, keyboard placed on a pull-out table draw, that had beveled wooden edges, which in turn, chocked my wrists after 15 minutes of use. The mini-tower cabinet was between my legs, quietly humming to the rhythm of hard drive’s rpm. That would be a typical cyber cafe.
The callousness of users in cyber cafes surprises me. So many users had saved their usernames and passwords, without realizing that their precious data was getting stored on very public machines! You could go to Gmail.com and see pre-filled usernames and passwords. Type a first letter and it would prompt a whole new login name followed by its corresponding saved password! All you have to do was just press enter and you’re in!
I tried one. The owner had a starred message, which was, in fact, the lost password details of his bank account! I logged out and pressed Control+Shift+Del to clear all private data before continuing. If some prankster had used that terminal, he could have easily wiped the guy’s bank account clean!
People, I assume, probably blink through screens. They might be saving a piece of themselves and their wallet inadvertently on those machines they use temporarily. Like they say, no one can save the ignorant.
It’s good to be extra paranoid. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to check for fishy processes running in the background. Close those annoying IM programs (Rediff Bol, Yahoo! IM and MSN Messenger were among the most common programs sitting in system trays).
Before leaving the terminal, after clearing all my private data, I’d go back to a site to see if it showed any of my details like my login name, search strings, get type URIs (all commands in the address bar separated by the ampersand and question marks) or such related stuff.
During every visit, I spent 10-15 minutes on precautionary measures: first installing Firefox, and later in the end, clearing all my private data, and double-checking on them. You should too.
I haven’t accessed the Net from a cyber cafe in years especially after widespread wifi access all over the US at least. Even then I rarely access my high-risk data like bank accounts, etc when I am on an open wifi network. It pays to be cautious.
Oct 19, 06 at 14:20While wifi might probably the cheapest solution yet for mass connectivity, it is a distant dream in India.
My observation, surprisingly, was that you don’t have to really operate your sensitive bank accounts or do financial transactions to get knocked out. Access to your primary inbox is good enough to get a shovel load of all your private pins and passwords. That I consider most dangerous.
Even on a wifi, I use SSL (replace http with https in the address bar for gmail address), that would at least mask my traffic open to air and would make it harder to decipher.
The other most obvious dangers are from malware and key loggers that might be recording your every stroke (check processes and shutdown fishy ones).
Also, when you’re buying airline tickets and your filling out your credit card info, I’ve seen people forgetting to erase the auto-complete feature that still keeps the data even when the history is wiped by the user!
Oct 19, 06 at 19:47