In February, a crowd of cybersecurity professionals attended the RSA Conference in San Francisco.
In February, a crowd of cybersecurity professionals attended the RSA Conference in San Francisco. One cybersecurity CEO, Kent Lawson, founder of Private WiFi, a VPN for consumers and small businesses, read a disclaimer in the official conference guide regarding the free and admittedly insecure wireless network. It said: “We strongly recommend that you use appropriate security measure, such as utilizing a VPN connection, installing a personal firewall and keeping your operating system up-to-date with security patches.”
His curiosity was piqued, so he decided to see how many of these world-class security experts actually followed this common sense advice. Using a “sniffing” tool he hacked into the Wi-Fi communications. As you would expect, a lot of the traffic was indeed encrypted – these were security experts, after all.