Are You Hacking The Coffee Shop?

Came across this Tweet from Iggy over Twitter today. As Iggy points out, this story has yet to be confirmed. But despite this, it does bring up some interesting questions. Are some establishments so insecure that they would go so far as to bother a paying customer with idle threats and zero evidence to back up the insane claims that they are making? If the story linked above checks out, it is highly possible.

Let me give you yet another example. My mom’s used bookstore. I handle most of its IT operations remotely, but also have some stuff localized to save me time dealing with people creating problems. I use Sputnik for my walled garden needs and here soon, I will be investigating adding Untangle to the network assuming I can get it to play nice with the existing network setup. Sputnik is not your usual setup, so it may take some doing to get both tools working together.

So assuming that the owner of the establishment had something like SonicWall or Untangle in place, I still find it highly unlikely that they would be stupid enough to harass a customer like that. Clearly, they must be smart enough to realize that anyone within Wi-Fi distance could be the person accessing the network he was so concerned about.

But digging deeper into the story, I found one thing bothersome. Why in the heck would anyone be dumb enough to have their financial records available on a PC connected to a publicly shared network? It’s possible, but I found that to be rather odd. As Iggy pointed out, though, this story is not substantiated.

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