« BackAsk HN: Dangers of Unsecured WiFi?undefinedSubmitted by Appsmith 19 hours ago
  • cssanchez 16 hours ago

    There is a CVE issued a week ago for all Apple OSs that are not on the latest update (Mac iOS, etc). Maybe you were affected.

    https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2024/09/18/apple-rel...

    • Appsmith 14 hours ago

      Thank you! Yes I’m still 2 OS versions back.

    • fabioyy 18 hours ago

      unless you accepted an invalid https certified popup, its not possible, even on public wifi. or maybe you still type: http:// instead of https://, and then is easy to fake a dns response to point to a clone site

      • raxxorraxor 18 hours ago

        Ironically because MITM attacks for corporate security are that common, a lot of developer tools are configured to just ignore TLS checks instead of importing the correct root certificate.

        In case of an unsecured WiFi connection this is of course much more dangerous even.

        • Appsmith 14 hours ago

          Wow! Didn’t know this!

          I would’ve thought they would let devs handle it because if anything they’re more capable of these kinds of things (not counting myself ofc :-))

          • solardev 13 hours ago

            I think developers are especially at risk, because we all think we know the risks and can manage them better... yeah, right lol.

            It's like how doctors and nurses are notoriously bad at getting their own health checkups. They're experts, they know better!

            Pfft. How many of us actually spend time (and have the knowledge for) auditing the security of our OS, cert chains, HTTPS setup, etc.? I've seen experienced senior devs share private keys over Slack for the whole team to reuse, manually disable HTTPS checks with a comment like "too much trouble", etc. It's pretty scary.

            • Appsmith 10 hours ago

              That does sound very familiar!

        • Appsmith 14 hours ago

          Thanks, that makes me feel a little better because I did use the https bookmark I had and didn’t type in the addr.

        • bearjaws 18 hours ago

          Have you confirmed you are locked out of Firebase? Performed a password reset?

          If you get to login, check your compute resources since most of these bots just deploy tons of compute and use them for DDOS. This can be in the hundreds of dollars per hour figure.

          It is possible to have your session hijacked when using any wifi really, its a lot harder on secured wifi though.

          I only tether to my phone now in public, and never use unsecured wifi for anything.

          • Appsmith 18 hours ago

            Didn’t try the password reset until you mentioned. Thanks, that worked.

            Google did send me two Security alerts (one for each laptop) when I tried signing in yesterday with my old pwd. So they must have reset my password or something?

            In any case, lesson learned: never connect to an unsecured Wi-Fi again! (I rarely do, but I was at this conference last week trying to demo Appomate AI, and was wanting it to be as snappy as possible. Bad decision!)

          • FergusArgyll 15 hours ago

            I once connected to unsecured wifi and 2 minutes later started getting ungodly amounts of spam, just spam everywhere filling up my inbox etc.

            I started panicking, going over to people around me asking if they've ever experienced such a thing. All I got was a bunch of "huh? no never"s.

            I found out a couple hours later that by pure coincidence my friend pranked me right then by signing my email address up for all the spam newsletters etc. he could find....

            • Appsmith 14 hours ago

              Hehe….life would be so boring without coincidences!

              But I definitely panicked too and still a worried if I carried something over to my home network.

              I’m a developer and at least superficially aware of the issues. Can’t imagine what non techies go through when faced with such situations!!

            • beardyw 17 hours ago

              The London underground now provides mobile connectivity. I have a gut feeling that that is more secure, but probably costly and bureaucratic.

              • Appsmith 14 hours ago

                I hear you!

                I really need to let go of these self-sabotage tendencies fast!!

              • brudgers 13 hours ago

                [My works-on-my-machine]

                By default, I tether my phone. In the places that's not possible, the public WiFi is typically part of large scale infrastructure like an airport.

                The biggest practical advantage of tethering is not security. It's repeatability. Sure security matters and I trust my phone's security. But not having to navigate other people's ideas of internet access is why I tether.

                Good luck.

                • Appsmith 10 hours ago

                  Thanks, makes sense!