The first thing they taught me when I started taking business courses in college was that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Some may disagree with this statement, but even “free” things carries costs even if they are sometimes a bit abstract.
I guess I shouldn’t have been all that suprised to find out today that the two months I used “free WiFi” in my apartment may not have turned out to be free after all. At the time, I was fighting with Comcast and figured I could leech off of free hot spots to tide me over. For the most part, I didn’t think too much about the security issues associated with doing this, but after reading Q Daily News’ article on scammers using Ad-Hoc networks to get private information, I’m now quite nervous that I may have put sensitive data at risk.
After booting up his laptop and looking for a nearby WiFi network, Jason saw a number of “ad-hoc” networks that were pretending to be Tmobile or Starbuck hot spots. In the comments a reader reports that this could be an issue with people having their laptop set up improperly, so it might not necessarily be scammers coming after you, but if you see these ad-hoc networks, it’s probably not a good idea to be doing Google searches for your social security numbers on them.