Security experts today suggested ways users can protect themselves against Firesheep, the new Firefox browser add-on that lets amateurs hijack users' access to Facebook, Twitter and other popular services via Wi-Fi.
Firesheep adds a sidebar to Mozilla's Firefox browser that shows when anyone on an open network -- such as a coffee shop's Wi-Fi network -- visits an insecure site. A simple double-click gives a hacker instant access to logged-on sites ranging from Twitter and Facebook to bit.ly and Flickr. Since researcher Eric Butler released Firesheep on Sunday, the add-on has been downloaded nearly 220,000 times. ...
The best defense, said Chet Wisniewski, a senior security adviser at antivirus vendor Sophos, is to use a VPN (virtual private network) when connecting to public Wi-Fi networks at an airport or coffee shop, for example. [Date: 26 October 2010; Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9193201/]
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