ZOMG those unprotected connections!

[Wayne]

A few years ago I was on a bus coming home from a conference in London. For some reason the USB chargers on the bus weren't working so people were panicking about their phones running out of charge. I had a USB charger I'd built from a kit and a bunch of 18650 batteries I'd ripped out of a lot of laptop batteries I'd won online. 18650s are great, and run pretty much everything these days. Your laptop, your vape, your battery powered drill, your torch, most are run using these batteries. The guy in the seat in front of me turned around and asked if he could charge his phone up using my charger and I of course said yes because I'm a nice guy. Neither he or I worried about data being stolen from his phone. He likely didn't care so long as he was still able to charge up his phone so he could keep in touch with his family and tell them how much longer it'd be until he was at the stop by them. I was also unworried as I'd built the thing and knew it only connected to the positive and negative connections of any cable plugged into it. The data cables weren't connected, just the power ones.

When I go on holidays I take a 4G hub with me. Everyone in the group connects to it. It's fine. I could of course steal all their details if I were an asshole, but I'm not. I've said in previous blog posts about people giving me their passwords when I work on their computers. If I wanted their login details I could just ask them for them and they'd give them to me. I have more important things to do than log into someone else's account.

People can access your data if you connect to a network run by a criminal. Not every connection is going to give a crook complete access to your entire life though. What it comes down to is using common sense. If you're in public and need to connect then be sure to use a legitimate connection. If you're unsure then don't connect. You can also buy power only cables. That'll mean if you plug into a USB hub it'll only connect the power cables. You can usually tell them as they're the cheap, thin ones.

What it comes down to is this - yes some people can set up a connection to steal your data. With a little bit of common sense you can avoid it happening. Being careful is fine. Being paranoid about every connection you see isn't going to help. If you want to be 100% sure, invest in a USB power bank and 4G dongle. That way you'll never need to connect to anything you don't know the history of. They're not expensive and could save you a lot of stress.