Why Public Network is not safe and tips to keep yourself safe.

How do you keep yourself safe in Internet ?

I have already mentioned about privacy in internet  and internet is not that safe place you can think of and there is always a possibility to grab your data from internet .

So , how public network is not safe ?

You might have heard about hacking , There is much more probability to steal your data when you are on a public network by hackers. There are number of techniques to grab your data in internet or in your public network , This post illustrates how to steal your data so that you can understand what information can be stolen when you are using internet in a public network so that you can keep your important data safe.
Hackers might be not that intelligent , It is enough to have little more knowledge than you to hack your information . There are four basic principles on which internet works

Confidentiality

Authentication

Integrity

Non Repudiation

Violation of any of these principles can steal your data , There is a tool called CAIN & ABEL which can steal your data by sniffing. Sniffing is an act of intercepting the packets and decodes them that flow across your network. Cain is not only the single tool that can sniff there are many different sniffers available in internet like wireshark , etheral that can sniff your data.

So , Now you should understand that in a public network there will be no end to end connectivity between your system and system you want to connect so that there is always possibility of sniffing your information.

Creators already thought of it and proposed many concepts like Cryptography and Secure Socket Layers (SSL) to protect your data from sniffing. In Cryptography instead of sending actual message you will send an encoded message so that sniffers or interceptors cannot actually intrepret the data that is being sent and while at receivers end data is decoded and can be read.

To know which data that you are sending is safe it can be said that any data that you are sending across an https:// connection is safe.

HTTP stands for hyper text transfer protocol and

HTTPS stands for hyper text transfer protocol secure.

You can identify this by a small “S” appearing at the end of http as shown below image.

and the other way is encrypting your data , The best possible to way to keep your data secure even in public network is by connecting through a VPN of your home network.

Here I want to cite an example that when I tried sniffing , When I was sniffing there was a connection from local system on public network to a server , I forgot the name of the website but what I found is some USERNAME and PASSWORD fields that are transported to that website. Then I tried the same password on the secure connection gmail and yahoo . And you know what that password worked and it happened to be a lady , then I informed that your account can be hacked and it is not safe to use internet in such manner and forgot the incidence.

Most websites provide a check box for remember me and say un check this option if it is a public network computer while logging in as it was public network its not safe to remember a minor username or password traces in that system.

That’s all about securing data in public network and Now you may draw your own interpretation to understand the security of your network.

Words to Know

Packet :

In internet all data transmitted in bits and pieces , These bits and pieces are logically grouped into frames and this frames are again logically grouped to form as packet. Each packet will have senders address and receivers address so that it knows where to go and where to arrive at.