If you are staying in a hotel that offers a tablet such as an iPad and a free WiFi connection, might the device also include private personal information from previous guests who had stayed in the same room? In other words, might such details – as accounts with pre-saved passwords, authorised sessions on social networks, search results from the browser that all allow some future user to gain your identity – be from you?!
Dmitry Bestuzhev of the IT security product company Kaspersky Lab speaks from experience of a hotel stay. He says that it’s unwise to use a free public device for personal and private communication.
“You just never know if the device is backdoored or who might be behind such hospitality? Second, if a public facility wants to offer its guests free portable devices for the duration of their stay, it’s important that such devices are a properly configured first, to apply sensible security policies such as not storing personal information, not saving passwords and so on. Maybe I’m too suspicious, but having an unknown and untrusted device like a tablet in my room, which is equipped with an embedded camera and a mic, I just preferred to switch it off and store it inside a drawer. I had to do this every afternoon since the cleaning staff put it back on the desk every day I was at the hotel.
“You have also remember that, even if such a free device is properly configured and does not visibly store any private information, you can’t be sure that the next guest is not an expert in forensic analysis, in which case they could just take an image of the whole device and then recover your personal information step by step.”
For the full blog post visit the securelist.com website – https://securelist.com/blog/research/67318/leave-your-passwords-at-the-checkout-desk/.
