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Hi

I have suffered from credit card details theft on two occasions in the last year or so and am reviewing my IT security arrangements. I am running a wireless router with WPA2 PSK with AES encryption and mac address filtering. I am also using a key of 63 randomly generated characters long. Do I need to implement anything else or is this combination adequate for 'normal' personal needs?

Mike

 

Keep in mind that MAC filtering doesn't do anything to stop people from listening to the signal, it just stops them from being able to transmit through it.

Also, if they clone your MAC address (not hard) then it bypasses that.

Otherwise, it sounds similar to my setup.

On a different note, something I would suggest is acquiring a credit card from somewhere get a low limit ($500-$1000) and only use that for online purchases if you feel that is where you are being compromised.


Are you sure that the internet was how you were compromised? Also are you sure you only enter credit card details on secured (SSL) websites? No way you've fallen victim to any social engineering (aka: phishing) attacks? Honestly speaking, all of these are much simpler and beneficial from the point of view of attackers since breaking your wireless setup will provide them only your information, the other ones can be used to collect multiple users with the same effort.

 

I have been thinking that those prepaid credit cards may be the way to go for online purchases. The only downside could be if dispute resolution becomes neccessary.

 

Hello,

Wireless security notwithstanding, ask yourself what you're running on your machine. You can use the finest encryption and 540-character passphrase, if your machine is infected and communicating with a remote pc, then it might send out all sorts of info, including the key strokes you type when purchasing online.

No need to kill yourself with extremely long passphrases, you probably don't live near 300 worst hackers in the world. Use a reasonable password, enable firewall and, most importantly, don't get your machine infected.

Mrk