BBC Watchdog finds public Wi-Fi hotspots open to hackers
Connections provided by the UK's top three Wi-Fi networks - BT Openzone, The Cloud, and T-Mobile - are all vulnerable to attack by hackers, leaving people at risk of fraud, according to BBC's Watchdog.
In a programme due to air on Thursday night, it claims that the thousands of hotspots available nationwide - in hotels, trains, airport lounges and high street food outlets - are less safe than they appear.
Watchdog said that it used equipment readily available on the internet to hijack wireless traffic at a variety of hotspots, while experts working with the programme-makers could have been able to take control of other hotspot users' internet accounts. Once inside these accounts, malicious hackers would have then been able to harvest masses of personal data which could enable them to access the users' accounts on a variety of websites, including those for shopping and banking.
