Have you ever heard of Firesheep?I never did until I read a story about it and went to the web page of the creator of the program. It is amazing to me that Firesheep has been around for over a month, is legal albeit immoral and that I have never heard of it. I dug a little deeper and apparently it is authentic, another risk to internet security and available in open source which means anyone can get it.
Firesheep is a Firefox extension that gives its user the capability to steal your personal and login information at certain websites including Facebook, if you are using a public wifi internet connection. The websites at risk begin with http and not the secured https.
This would mean that tens of thousands of internet users private information is at risk daily in airports, hotel lobby's, coffee shops and anywhere else there is a public wifi connection!
Firesheep is a danger to our cyber security
Firesheep was developed by Eric Butler. His stated purpose is to "show" the owners of websites like Facebook the security flaws in the system so that they will fix it. What he accomplished instead is to provide an extremely dangerous tool to basically anyone that wants it.
Apparently hackers who are internet savvy have been able to do what Firesheep does for some time. The danger with Firesheep is that anyone can simply download this capability because it is not that difficult. I know because I did it to see how much computer and internet knowledge is required to accomplish it. The answer is not much. I then deleted it from my system and am now trying to figure out the fix.
Google the term Firesheep, read about it, understand the problem and let us know your thoughts and even more importantly, any fixes that you may have found.
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