Have you ever noticed when trying to connect your Laptop on a wireless network service, sometimes it shows a network “Free Public WiFi” along with your own available wireless service or several others service provider in your neighborhood. Now as it is a tendency of a man that a word free always attracts him and he doesn’t see any harm to try it once and i am sure a lot of us while looking for wireless connection on airport or at their residential places must have made their mood to check whether is it really free….

Myself also caught into the same situation some time ago when i found the similar image shown above and connected it and in result it almost killed my system.  When searched about the term I was came in knowledge that the difference is clearly mentioned in the below image as first two shows that these are wireless networks while the third one is “computer to computer network”. Now what is this —

These are the hacking points set by some hackers at the public points or the airport lounge to steal secured password or some confidential data  such as online banking passwords , and once a user connected to their networks they can easily access to his her personal files or data.  As the name suggests it is a free public WiFi a lot of us tries to connect and once connected — note that this is a computer to computer connection– it locate and transfer the information about your all the network names you have viewed and it automatically log on with the saved names making a clear path to fraud. Thus, users  who connect to these “free” networks are at great risk of experiencing a “channeling” attack. “Channeling” is a common practice used by hackers and identity thieves to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks, with the objective of stealing user names, passwords, and other sensitive data transmitted by the user. However, Normally, wireless networks are created, run, and governed by a router. But, two Wi-Fi-enabled computers can talk directly to each other without the need for a router-based network. And sometime this this type of network is referred as “ad-hoc”.

So, don’t be the victim of these hackers and always  configure laptops to use  router-based networks instead of any available networks as below shown this can be found at  Control Panel -> Network Connections -> Wireless Networks tab -> Advanced button.

So the next time when you are going to connect your wireless device at an unknown location plz mind the below suggestion …

• Before connecting to a network, look around and locate a sign that advertises the network you are connecting to and verify that the network name (SSID) you are connecting to is a legitimate service.
  Shut off your wireless card if you’re not planning to connect to the Web or another machine. It will protect you from intrusion and save your battery life.
• Beware of the information you share in public locations. Even seemingly innocuous logins to Web-mail accounts could give hackers access to get into your more important data, since most people utilize the same password with a few variants for almost all online activities.
  Utilize a VPN whenever possible to encrypt your data, and stronger tools if you need to conduct secure transactions.
• Turn off shared folders. If you join a malicious network, a hacker could easily load a malicious spyware agent to follow you even after you leave the public location.
• Run a comprehensive security suite and keep it up to date to prevent spyware and viruses.

If you are looking for more information Click link Free Public WiFi SSID here