Your Email can be intercepted ! Check How

Mar 22, 2008 by Ashik in Email Hacking, Security | Tags: Cracking, Email, Email Hacking, Hacking, Interception, Sniffing

vi. Hotel/Conference Center/Internet Cafe

Many luxury and business-class hotels and conference centers provide Internet connectivity as part of their standard service offering. This is an extremely convenient service, but it is also a significant security risk if not structured correctly. The hotel or conference center’s internal network has close parallels to a corporate network, and typically either hotel employees or other guests may intercept traffic on this type of network with great ease. In a hotel or conference center access to the internal network is effectively open to anybody willing to book a room.

Try this – the next time you book a hotel or conference center that offers Internet connectivity, inquire as to the measures that have been taken to protect traffic on the internal network, not just from external attacks but from internal attacks as well. See what the response is…

Internet cafés take this security risk to an entirely new level. When you sit down at an Internet café and start sending messages, the person sitting immediately next to you could be intercepting and reading everything you say!

Housing Provided Connectivity

Many condominium and apartment complexes are starting to offer built-in high speed Internet connectivity as an incentive to prospective tenants. This is very similar to the hotel/conference center model and has the same risks and concerns – if anything, however, an internal network owned and administered by a property management company is probably likely to be less well administered and protected than an internal network owned by a large hotel chain – at least the hotel chain probably has corporate IT standards that they ostensibly must follow.

vii. Interception in a College Environment

College/Trade School
Colleges and trade schools are another hotbed of interception activities. College networks are typically reasonably similar to corporate networks, and pose the same risks and opportunities for traffic interception. However, in a collegiate culture there is typically more ‘hacking’ type activity going on, and thusly the risk of interception is probably greater than in a corporate environment (though the value of the transmitted information is typically much lower.) Colleges typically provide students with their own email addresses, and also typically have a somewhat distributed physical environment.

viii. Local Loop Interception

Local Loop
Connectivity provision solutions such as cable modems and other broadband technologies use a ‘shared local loop’ network model. This means that all cable modem traffic in your local neighborhood is traveling across a shared physical wire or set of wires, albeit modulated to unique frequency ranges. This is typically the same physical wire that also carries other services such as cable television to your house.

While intercepting your next door neighbor’s email messages isn’t quite as easy as just running a packet sniffer on your machine (there is some little bit of hardware that you need as well), it is not at all that difficult to achieve - the technique is reasonably well documented in certain circles. The same technique applies to tapping into the loop itself.