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eee wireless security guidelines

March 16, 2008 – 3:13 am

Ultramobile laptops like the Asus EEE PC gave us more liberty, to surf, chat, talk and access our data anywhere with wireless signal. The downside is a serious question that has to be raised, concerning the security of your data and privacy.

Surfing outdoor

Here are a few points to consider when surfing outdoor.
If you have to check sensitive, private or corporate data over the internet with your eee, prefer a dedicated wireless connection, like a 3G or HSDPA connection. Many providers do offer interesting flat rates, but that really depends of the situation in your country. A good place to check for informations for US citizens is gigaom.
If you surf with your eee pc from a public wireless hotspot, a malicious person can sniff all of your traffic without being detected. From your data, that person could retrieve emails, passwords, see the webpages you checked, see your msn chat, eavedrop your voip calls, virtually everything. Your cookies can be intercepted, and exploited. This means an attacker could check your hotmail, yahoo, gmail or facebook account without even knowing your password, until your sessions expires.

Tightening your home network security

If you have a wireless router at home, there are measures you must take in order to protect yourself from many situations endangering your data and privacy

• A malicious user could connect to your network, and use it to launch attacks or download illegal material, and you would be held responsible.

• Someone could sniff your traffic in a way you couldn’t notice nor detect, thus stealing your sensitive data, as explained above.

Here are a few countermeasures to take.
Data encryption renders your network’s traffic more difficult to exploit. Choose the WPA or WPA2 standard over WEP. The WEP encryption can be broken in less than a minute.
Additionaly, when creating a PSK (Public Shared Key), do not use common words since even WPA can be subject to a dictionnary attack. Prefer a strong password of at least twelve characters, made of minuscule and capital letters, numbers and special characters.
Filter MAC addresses. Every network adapter has a unique MAC address, so you can create in your router’s settings a list of authorized computers. While the mac address can be easily spoofed by an attacker, it is surely better to set a filter.
We will update those tips over time, if you have any question feel free to drop us a comment.

Wish you all safe surfing,

eeextra