Wi-fi Security At My Apartment

[macone]

My apartment building has free wi-fi. I have two user accounts setup on my laptop.

I have been using one of the user accounts only when I am on the wireless internet connection.

I then will turn off the wi-fi connection and log out of the first user account and then log in to the second user account where I keep all my sensitive. Is this helping to keep my laptop more secure ?

[Petch01]

I suppose that you have an account for WLAN (wireless local area network) and an account for LAN (wired local area network).

Does your WLAN have encryption such as WPA? If not, it's good to send sensitive information through LAN. Take care that none of your folders is shared. Look at this in "My Computer".

Petch01

[nikster]

My apartment building has free wi-fi. I have two user accounts setup on my laptop.

I have been using one of the user accounts only when I am on the wireless internet connection.

I then will turn off the wi-fi connection and log out of the first user account and then log in to the second user account where I keep all my sensitive. Is this helping to keep my laptop more secure ?

the only way this would really help security is if the wifi account does not have admin rights.

more important would be to shut down all sharing and ports that Microsoft leaves open for various things that you don't need. I use the Secure-IT program to shut all this stuff off - it's a bit technical but it basically modifies a lot of Windows settings so that it's safe. It doesn't install or run any extra software, it's just using built-in Windows functions - Windows can be pretty secure, the problem is just that the default settings are very bad.

Secure-IT can be found here: http://www.sniff-em.com/secureit.shtml

It's free as in free beer. When you use it, just follow its recommendations except leave "local" ActiveX access on. ActiveX is used by a variety of software so shutting it down will render that non-functional. And you can avoid any ActiceX security holes by using Firefox which doesn't support ActiveX.

[Crushdepth]

Main thing is to make sure you have a personal firewall up at all times. Do not put the LAN as a 'trusted' zone. Anything in a shared folder can be read and if they are writable then people can drop junk on your computer too.

Just check that your firewall is set up properly and don't worry about it. Also, try to avoid logging in to email accounts or anything sensitive unless it has an encrypted connection.