Attention all travellers using Kinko's computer rentals and other cyber cafe computers while on the road - read this article. It contains important information about protecting your personal/financial/password information while using these rental computers. The bottom line is - don't use rental computers to access critical financial or personal information. At several Kinko's in the New York City area, a person installed software that recorded the keystroke information gathered from people using the computer rentals.
He ended up getting personal and financial information from more that 450 different people. If you need to access and use a password protected account from a rental computer you should cut and paste the password from a word document where the password is in the middle of random or gobbleygook writing. say for example your password is "27bluebird" then in the word document you have a paragraph of stuff like "3445black85the9427marker94world9875baseball8765....." Then you would cut and paste the string of characters that contains "27" and then "black" then "bird". this will give you far greater security than just typing in your password on a computer that might have key capture software hidden on it.
July 27, 2003
Spy puts kink in public Web terminals
By Anick Jesdanun
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK - For more than a year, unbeknown to people who used Internet terminals at Kinko's stores in New York, Juju Jiang was recording what they typed, paying particular attention to their passwords.
Jiang had secretly installed, in at least 14 Kinko's stores, software that logs individual keystrokes. He captured more than 450 user names and passwords, using them to access and even open bank accounts online.
Posted by travelsafetyblog at May 25, 2004 12:16 PM