Can anyone recommend a secure browser? (email, server, wi-fi, work)
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We are getting internet service while up at a temporary location via an Xfinity hotspot. We have Xfinity internet at our home and paid for the upgrade which allowed us to use the hotspot in our temporary home just like our regular home internet.
But they warned us this would not be secure and said we should use something more secure to work on "business" things while at this temporary location.
Well, when the Xfinity guy setting this up for us was telling us to make sure we were on a secure browser for anything "business" he named something called Constant Guard, or Secure Safe. I have not tried to find these but someone might know about them.
But they warned us this would not be secure and said we should use something more secure to work on "business" things while at this temporary location.
Can anyone point me to a secure browser? Thanks.
The security issues he is talking about is the hotspot and spoofing. The hotspot can be spoofed, e.g. someone names their router xfinitywifi and you connect to it or your device automatically connects to it.
Unencrypted traffic passing though the router can be read. You come here for example, since it's not over https your login details are sent plain text. The person with the malicious router has script running to obtain login details for sites using common software like this, once they know your password and username the script can login as you here to grab your email. Once they have your email it's off to your email account to try the password there..... this is one of the reasons it's important to use different passwords on different sites. This type of exploit applies to any public router and it's only one example.
If the site is using https they can't do this. Not only does that green lock tell you the traffic to and from the site is encrypted but it also authenticates the site as being the real one.
So, if I understand this correctly, all of the better browsers
(Chrome, Explorer (Edge), Opera, Firefox, etc) do the job
pretty well, but it is still up to the user to double check and
make sure that little padlock is locked. ?
So, if I understand this correctly, all of the better browsers
(Chrome, Explorer (Edge), Opera, Firefox, etc) do the job
pretty well, but it is still up to the user to double check and
make sure that little padlock is locked. ?
It really has nothing to do with the Browser itself. Using a public hot spot is the issue. That's why people generally use VPNs on public Wi-Fi.
11-10-2017, 12:00 PM
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n/a posts
If it's really sensitive, use a VPN. Opera has it built in but you can use a VPN with whatever browser you want.
The browser you use is irrelevant in the context of this sort of potential threat.
So, if I understand this correctly, all of the better browsers
(Chrome, Explorer (Edge), Opera, Firefox, etc) do the job
pretty well, but it is still up to the user to double check and
make sure that little padlock is locked. ?
I'm not positive but I believe they all use the same color scheme. Again this authenticates that example.com is example.com. The lock can be locked but not green in which case it may not be valid certificate, your browser should issue a warning and you can make an exception for it. Something like this would occur if you were accessing a web hosting control panel and it's using self signed certificate.
There is other situations where there may be warning indicator with a green lock. For example if you are viewing a forum page over https a user may use the bbcode to insert an image that is not over https. If there is any questions just click the lock and it will tell you what the problem is.
...locked but not green in which case it may not be valid certificate, your browser should issue a warning and you can make an exception for it. Something like this would occur if you were accessing a web hosting control panel and it's using self signed certificate.
...
I run into that when entities I frequent change web servers and URL's but try to use the same old certificate. Usually there is a note on the old URL before it forwards me, so it is obvious what the problem is.
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