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> Devil's Advocate: there is no world wide cabal of wifi hackers trying to steal the Facebook login cookies of starbucks customers. The lack of security is real
by hackuser 12y ago
> Devil's Advocate: there is no world wide cabal of wifi hackers trying to steal the Facebook login cookies of starbucks customers. The lack of security is real, but the dangers are overblown.
Perhaps not, but consider for example that the Starbucks near people with valuable IP (e.g., many Starbucks in Silicon Valley, in NYC, in Washington DC, in Redmond WA, in Cambridge MA, in Beverly Hills, in the Hamptons, etc.) would be valuable targets.
- peterwwillis 12y agoA valuable target will always get hacked because they'll be specifically targeted. For most of them it'll be from spearphishing, but there's a multitude of ways to attack people even if https is the default. All well known celebrity hacks are done either by spearphishing or breaking into an account independent of contact with the person. And in general it's probably not a good idea to set world-wide standards on the most used high level protocol in the world based on a few rich people who use the net from an unsecure device.
- hackuser 12y ago> A valuable target will always get hacked because they'll be specifically targeted. For most of them it'll be from spearphishing, but there's a multitude of ways to attack people even if https is the default. Yes there are other vulnerabilities, but that's not a reason to fail protect against this one (taking that reasoning to an extreme, all security is pointless because there always are other vulnerabilities). The purpose of security is to increase the cost of a successful attack; https has a high ROI in many cases. In the example you give, spear-phishing is much more expensive than sniffing wifi.