internet cafes on holiday

[asteroid]

question: with the constant threat of spyware and malware,

if you are on holiday, do you really trust internet cafes if the computers are probably not likely to have upto date security software?

I have seem some truly terrible ones, where the rooms are dinghy the PCs look old and abused with drive panels missing, dirty keyboards, yellowing monitors, so who knows what horrors are on there in terms of software.

Im thinking of compiling some apps I could put on a USB stick, such as portable firefox, what would you all recommend?

[Coops]

Personally i would never trust a system that i did not know anything about. You never know what kind of nasty programs could be running. Especially ones that could be key logging.

With security of personal data being such a big issues these days, i simply would not trust a computer that i had not personally setup the security on and thus knew what it is like with regards to updates and protection.

So browse the internet, yes no problem. Log in to anything secure that requires me to hand over infromation such as user names, passwords etc not a chance.

[Nox]

I recommend having a holiday and completely ignoring your emails for a week or two :D ie personally, I don't trust em in the slightest!

Nox

[David T]

I went to Whitby and had no net access at all apart from one small cafe that had 2 net enabled PC's you could use for an hour at a time.

I think most people are savy enough to not use them for anything other then browsing. Also units like that are normally set as limited users and won't let you install anything anyway.

[Nox]

Won't let most people install things ;)

Even from within a regular user account I could pop a program onto a PC and boot it from within HKLM (ie will run on whoever logs in) within the registry in about hmmm, 5 mins tops, would be less than 30 seconds if I had prepared them on a webserver somewhere and could download them.

Now imagine if it were a key logger, then are all your passwords different to your email one? I hope so :p

They aren't secure. And I doubt most internet cafes have the spare time to check every pc at the end of every day.

Or find one with a linux terminal - and use that, atleast every 15 year old doesn't know how to bypass the security there!!!

Nox