Introduction

I came across an article dates back to 2011. The title of this article is called “New Hacking Tools Pose Bigger Threats to Wi-Fi Users”. The title of this article basically sums up what the type of threat it is and a general idea of what the article will be about. Turns out there were more to this title than I thought because the person imposing the threat is a network security expert, a white hat hacker.
Network Threat

A security expert by the name of Eric Butler decided to release a free hacking tool called Firesheep, onto the Internet. Firesheep is an add-on of Mozilla Firefox, which means a Firefox browser has to be installed, to use this software. What is so intriguing about this tool is, no hacking experience is required, and anyone that downloaded this software will be able to hijack login information on an open wireless network.
Threat materialized Firesheep was basically designed to targeted sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, Amazon, eBay, etc. Sites that didn’t fully implemented HTTPS. HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, it is a communication protocols that provides encryption communications between its sender and its receiver. Websites that don’t support HTTPS or doesn’t fully use HTTPS are at risk of exposing their users’ information during their session with the site.
Firesheep nourished on websites without HTTPS. Because it provided Firesheep users with no limitation to amount of account logins they can obtained in a single day. Although Firesheep is mainly a threat to unsecured open wireless networks, however it can also become very much of a threat in secured networks as well. If a user really wanted to, he or she can easily downloaded free Wi-Fi hacking software, to crake and obtain Wi-Fi passwords from secured networks.
There are also high-powered Wi-Fi antennas that enable Wi-Fi signals to be