magicbus wrote:
Man in the middle can be enacted if a connection uses older security. It cannot (yet) be enacted against the latest TLS encryption, which I am quite sure all banks use. You can check your bank's encryption easily by clicking on the padlock. We rely on TLS 1.2 for all of our communication encryption needs for the banking software we develop, and we transfer trillions of dollars every day, even using HTTPS as one of our protocols.
Dave
I did not want to bore those not interested in the specifics of security. To clarify for those who are interested, TLS is not used by the banks per se, it is used by the browser to negotiate a connection to the bank, it is one of several options for negotiating an HTTPS secure browser connection. It is also a newer option that has only been the default connection method in the past few years "if" you are fully up to date. Many people, especially those who do not have easy access to broadband to download major updates or are hanging on to old computers using older OS's can be using browsers that are more vulnerable than others. Both scenarios are more common in the RV community due to less reliable access to unlimited or high speed internet. Add to that, we are often using easy to spoof public shared WIFI far more frequently when on the road and many mobile people purposely choose to turn off updates (like the ones that enforce TLS and disable SSL) to save bandwidth.
There are also too many other ways to exploit computers, some of which are not discussed in this thread, or many of which have not yet been published or patched, and there will be many more to follow them after they are published and patched.
The use of a VPN almost completely eliminates all of these potential risks some of which are very easy to exploit. It is a simple to setup and reasonably priced solution to avoid being the easy to target low hanging fruit that hackers look for.
