Speed and safety on the WiFi highway. How travellers can evade hotel hacking and zombies.

AS I PLUGGED into the free WiFi at my Bangkok hotel, a sign popped up prompting me to re-key in my Yahoo details to access my mail. I thought nothing of it and did as instructed. Yahoo has a terrible habit of ringing alarm bells every time I log-on from a different computer, or country, which is often. And, each time, it has asked me to change my password as a security precaution, exhausting my imagination and severely taxing my memory. But when the message flashed up a second time, I sensed a scam might be afoot. It was too late. My e-mail had been compromised, as I found out later.

Hotel cyber break-ins are not uncommon. In late 2014, Russian cyber sleuth Kaspersky Labsannounced the discovery of the ‘Darkhotel’ corporate espionage campaign, targeting high value business travellers at top-drawer Asian hotels. Kaspersky says, “Darkhotel has maintained a capability to use hotel networks to follow and hit selected targets as they travel around the world.” This is as brilliant, as it is Machiavellian. Most of the activity has been concentrated in Japan, South Korea, China and Russia.

The way it works is simple. After the hotel guest establishes a WiFi connection, he gets sent an innocuous alert for updates to Windows or other common software. These are the kinds of alerts that pop up all the time. But proceeding with the update in this case installs a ‘backdoor’ on your laptop enabling criminals to mine your keystrokes and access saved passwords and credit card data. After the information is extracted, Darkhotel methodically wipes its tracks and deletes the backdoor. It never existed.

Continued:

http://www.smarttravelasia.com/check-in.htm?

Thank you for the information.

I never thought of that, from now on have to be more careful.