Password security in internet cafes

buglawton

There are loads of discussions on home PC security but what if you depend on Internet cafes when travelling to read your email? How do you prevent viruses that reside on the cafe's systems from logging your password and sending it to hackers?

I know of one (to me unproven) trick of changing the 'focus' using the mouse then adding dummy keystrokes within your password - but this is clumsy.

Does anyone know of a proxy / 3rd party server based system where secrets shared between that proxy server & the user make keylogging ineffective? That is, you only supply partial info on a challenge/response basis to a 3rd party then get access to your passworded websites?

matty_c608

This is my worry too, and that is why I never login using a public system to my email and IM and other things of mine.

I think, well, you can get a bootable Windows on a USB Drive, so you could insert the USB drive, and have the system boot up via the USB drive (it'll be slow, but secure!). This way, no other keyloggers or files can be installed, as you know what is on the OS you booted up

fatnbald

You could try a U3 USB memory drive and use the u3 browsers to do you online mail check and surfing. There are U3 versions of outlook as well.

Nothing is installed on the host PC, all the progs run from the drive.

Kingston do a 2GB U3 USB pen drive which can be had for around 25 quid from Amazon.

http://www.u3.com/ gives you all the details

Darksun

You could try putting Portable Firefox on a pendrive, and getting that to remember your passwords, and just use one master password you only use for that. This will be fine for SSL sites where the password can't be intercepted. Of course, if the pendrive gets stolen or copied, you could be in a bit of trouble, so I wouldn't trust it for anything like banking or paypal

espresso

fatnbald wrote:

You could try a U3 USB memory drive and use the u3 browsers to do you online mail check and surfing. There are U3 versions of outlook as well.

Nothing is installed on the host PC, all the progs run from the drive.

I don't see how running any application from the USB memory, would prevent any key-loggers installed from working and reporting back home!

:rolleyes:

Leblanc_2

espresso wrote:

I don't see how running any application from the USB memory, would prevent any key-loggers installed from working and reporting back home!

:rolleyes:

What if you cut and pasted the passwords and sensitive numbers etc?

buglawton

Many internet cafes in any case won't allow the use of usb sticks or the booting up of your own operating system on their machine.