[Year 12 IPM] Student Hacking

[Donna Benjamin]

Only real way to protect internet traffic is to encrypt it.

You might like to look at GPG for email, and make sure you only use web
forms that use a secure connection (SSL/TLS)
http://www.gnupg.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPGP

It's also possible to sniff passwords sent via web browsers unless it's
using a secure connection which encrypts the traffic.

They say "security is a journey, not a destination".  Most people are
concerned when they discover how much of their traffic is legible, but
many find the process of encrypting their traffic not worth the trouble
for their perceived level of risk.

Many of my professional IT colleagues seem quite seriously paranoid
sometimes, but this apparent paranoia comes from their deep
understanding of how network traffic actually works.

cheers
- Donna

On Fri, 2006-10-20 at 17:20 +1000, Royce Williams wrote:
> I have had one of my students demonstrate to me a very easy to use
> network sniffing tool.
> It was able to read in clear text any contents of external emails
> arriving at and leaving our exchange server.
> It even captured and read attachments
> It cannot read internal exchange traffic. (yet)
>  
> It will also read http traffic .. show you what is on the page being
> looked and see passwords typed in.
>  
> has this become an issue for others yet .. are there ways of
> protecting your traffic etc.
>  
>  
>  
> Royce Williams 
> Manager Information Technology 
> Billanook College 
> 197-199 Cardigan Rd 
> Mooroolbark 3138 
> Victoria Australia 
> Tel: 61-3-9725 5388; Fax: 61-3-9725 8556 
> 
> 
>  
>  
> 
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-- 
donna benjamin - executive director
http://www.creativecontingencies.com/
ph +61 3 9326 9985 | mob +61 418 310 414
research - facilitation - web development