Firesheep attacks – How to protect against Firesheep attacks

Firesheep attacks with an unsecured Wi-Fi network. Here are some of the tips to protect against Firesheep attacks.

Firefox

If you are connected with an unsecured Wi-Fi network then your social network account is not secure at all because one can gain access to all of your social network login information whenever you are connected with an unsecured Wi-Fi network

According to Butler, “On an open wireless network, cookies are basically shouted through the air, making these attacks extremely easy”.

Eric Butler developed Firesheep, a new Firefox extension that play all the tricks. Firesheep has a list of sites that it can recognize, including Dropbox, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. If someone accesses one of these on an open network, then you will be informed with an icon and then a link allowing you access to that account.

Firesheep adds a sidebar to Mozilla’s Firefox browser that shows when anyone on an open network  and with a single click you can connect to any social network using that person’s user name and password.

Firesheep proves that how poor security is on these social network sites.

How to protect against Firesheep attacks

One way to protect against rogue Firesheep users, experts said on Tuesday, is to avoid public Wi-Fi networks that aren’t encrypted and available only with a password.

The best defense, said Chet Wisniewski, a senior security adviser at antivirus vendor Sophos, is to use a VPN (virtual private network) when connecting to public Wi-Fi networks