While it is a traumatic event, mobile devices are lost. Statistically, there is a one chance in three of losing a mobile device. Many of my Tico friends admit that they lost a cell phone, and I once left my cell phone in a rental car. Sometimes, you find your lost mobile device. Other times, the lost mobile device becomes a stolen device. Losing a cell phone is bad enough, but loosing a smartphone, or tablet, is much more serious. It is not just the cost of the device. Our mobile devices contain lots of personal information. This article lists the steps you can take to protect the data on your mobile device.

Step 1: You need to backup the data on your device to another computer or network backup server. This should be done on regular basis. A backup will give you a point of recovery should you not be able to retrieve your device.

Step 2: Every GSM/UTMS capable phone, or device, has a unique IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) number. Every manufacturer of a GSM device must report the IMEI numbers of imported devices to SUTEL. You can verify the IMEI number at SUTEL’s certification site. Record the IMEI number of your GSM/UTMS phones or tablets, and keep them in a safe place. You must report a lost or stolen phone to the police (in Costa Rica call 117), and give them the IMEI number as the serial number. With the police report, you can then contact your SIM carrier, and possibly get back your original phone number. It is a drastic step, but the SIM carrier can use the IMEI number to lock the device. There is no unlock code.

Step 3: When you power on your GSM device, it asks for a PIN number. This PIN number is the password for the SIM card. All someone has to do, is change the SIM card to access your phone. Some Nokia phones provide an option that force you to enter the Lock Code (see below), when the SIM card changes.

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Not too many years ago, public Wi-Fi hotspots were a rarity. As the market shifted to mobile devices, the demand for public Wi-Fi hotspots increased exponentially. Airports, hotels, coffee shops, restaurants, and bars quickly jumped on the band wagon to gain a competitive advantage. With our mobile devices, we look for public Wi-Fi hotspots. Mobile users rarely consider the dangers of a public Wi-Fi hotspot, and mobile devices lack the basic tools required to insure a save connection. This void created whole new criminal culture aimed at collecting personal information. Through understanding the dangers of public Wi-Fi networks, we can take the steps needed to safely use our mobile devices on public Wi-Fi networks.

Rule number one is to never connect to a public Wi-Fi network without a firewall and anti-virus protection. When using a public Wi-Fi network, you should assume that there is no network security. Ideally, a public Wi-Fi hotspot does not allow devices on the network to see each other. The Wi-Fi router should block any attempt to discover any other devices on the network. However, you cannot assume that this is the case. With one minor error in router configuration, the public Wi-Fi network looks like a local network, where all device can communicate with each other.

Rule number two is to use a VPN service for all sensitive information. There are just too many ways to decode normal browser traffic and collect personal information. With VPN, all information is encrypted, at a higher level of security.

Rule number three is to turn off the Wi-Fi feature that automatically connects your mobile device to the Wi-Fi hot spot with the strongest signal. With automatic connections, you may be connecting to a rogue public Wi-Fi hotspot. A rogue public Wi-Fi hotspot (also called “Man in The Middle”) connects to a legitimate Internet connection, and captures traffic as it passes through the rogue hotspot. This traffic is then decoded to collect account names, passwords, and credit card numbers. Even VPN encoded traffic is not immune to this attack, it just takes a lot more work to decode it.

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A firewall is normally a software application (there are a few hardware firewalls) that protects an internal network, or a device, from unwanted intrusion (inbound firewall), and guards the traffic going to the network (outbound firewall). An inbound firewall is like a security guard, who checks your identity and belongings before you enter a building. Their job is to prevent unauthorized access to the building. The security guard can also check what you are taking from the building to insure you are authorized to remove any articles from the building. Just as security guards follow a set of rules, so do firewalls.

There may be multiple firewalls between you and the Internet. I have worked in secure facilities where my badge granted me access to the building. The same badge determined which floors I could access, and then what rooms I could access on that floor. The inbound firewall on the router determines what traffic can enter the local network. The inbound firewall on the device determines the traffic allowed to pass to the device. For example, you have an computer on your local network that is a Web server for the external world. The router traps all incoming HTTP requests and directs them to the correct internal server, without telling the outside world the actual identity of the server. The external Web server accepts traffic from the external world, and the local network traffic. There may be other computers on the local network that host a Web server, but they block all traffic not coming from the internal network. Another example, the router blocks all requests for printer services, but the firewalls on the local network computers, with shared printers, only accept requests from the local network.

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This article is necessary in the world that we live in today. The vast majority of smartphones, cellphones, and tablets are sold without having any antivirus or firewall protection, leaving you very open to getting attacked and losing personal information. With the rise of banking applications and a massive increase in the personal information being shared on your iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, or another model cell phone, you will want to make note of the following to protect yourself here in Costa Rica.

Has your computer, or mobile device, ever been infected with a computer virus, computer worm, Trojan horse, spyware, or adware?

Malware is the term used to cover all these forms of attacks. Do you currently run anti-virus software to protect your computer, smartphone, or tablet from internal attacks by malware? If you are not running a program that detects, removes, and protects against malware, how do you know that your system is not infected? Before discussing how to protect your system, we need to understand each form of intrusion.

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Ever since communications leviathan ICE was resigned to loosen its iron grip of the wireless spectrum in Costa Rica, The Costa Rica Star has dutifully followed the events, trying to make sense of it all. Bill Anderson, our resident tech guru and former U.S. Air Force comms officer has weighed in with his valuable expertise with a series of articles that demystify the world of electronic personal communications in the 21^st century. The only thing missing was a first-person account of customer service and pricing, as well as street-level usage report. Luckily for us, the tiny and woefully overlooked digital news daily La Fragua commissioned Don Jose Rodolfo Ibarra to undertake the arduous process of setting off with a TuYo Movil SIM chip and visiting the retail operations of Claro, Kolbi, and Movistar.

Here’s a recap of Don Jose Rodolfo’s extremely detailed wireless journey, which La Fragua published over two lengthy articles. The Costa Rica Star added its part by testing a Claro 128K chip for voice calls and really cheap Internet use. We hope you find this information as valuable as we did:

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As we saw in the last article, Wi-Fi uses radio frequencies as the medium of communications between the Wi-Fi router and devices on the Local Area Network (LAN). In some locations of my house, my tablet sees signals from the Casa Conde Hotel, which is over a block away. Radio signals do not stop at the walls of a building, or a property line. If the your Wi-Fi router is not secured, it is an open invitation for others to use your network

I used to teach Linux and Unix seminars all over the USA, Canada, and many other countries. In most cases, I was not allowed to use the clients Internet to access the Internet for my business. So, at lunch and dinner, the exercise was to find a coffee shop, or restaurant, that provided public Wi-Fi access. I used a Wi-Fi radar app on my phone to determine were I was going to dine. It always amazed me how many businesses, and residences, had no security on their Wi-Fi network. Not only were they inviting others to use their Internet connection, but they were exposing all the computers on their network. Laptops, netbooks, tablets, and phones have the habit of connecting to the Wi-Fi hotspot that has the strongest signal. This can lead to accidental, but still unauthorized, use of someone’s network.

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We use the term Wi-Fi, but do we really know what it means. When looking at phone specifications, the Wi-Fi capabilities appear under WLAN (Wireless LAN), and LAN stands for Local Area Network. Don’t you love acronyms that contain acronyms. Wireless tells us that we are using radio frequencies as the communications media. LAN tells that we are connecting multiple devices into a single network. To avoid chaos on the network, some device must manage communications between devices, and that is the job of the WAP (Wireless Access Point). Other Wi-Fi enabled devices (laptops, phones, printers, scanners, Web cams, and TVs) are clients that connect to the WAP. They can communicate with each other because they are a part of the same LAN. Without getting into the world of protocol mania (more acronyms), the standard protocol for addressing devices is TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol), which uses a unique IP addresses to identify device. The WAP may be part of a router, which in turn, allows the LAN to connect to another network, usually to an ISP (Internet Service Provider) for small networks.

Wi-Fi is also an acronym for Wireless Fidelity, although we now use Wi-Fi as if were a noun. Wi-Fi, itself, refers to the IEEE 802.11 standard. IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and they number their standards. The goal of standards is to provide interoperability between devices. Unfortunately, manufactures interpreted the standard differently. In 1999, a group of industry leaders formed the Wi-Fi Alliance to certify products that complied to the IEEE 802.11 standard. The standard contains a number of subsections that are identified by appending lower cases letters to the standard.

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The Internet is one huge network that is subdivided into many smaller networks. Internet routers connect multiple small networks together to a form a bigger network. Internet traffic routing is a fascinating subject, and complex subject. For our purpose, we only need to know the role a router plays in connecting multiple devices to a single address provided by our ISP. When you connect your Internet device to an ISP, the ISP’s router defines a network consisting of two addresses: your IP address and the ISP’s IP address. This holds true for cable and USB data card connections. Large companies employ more complex solutions, but they have the networking staff to manage the complexity. For the small business and home user, we are granted only a single IP address. This limits the connection to a single device, as each device must have a unique IP address. I use the word device as a way to describe all Internet capable devices. This includes routers, computers, Internet ready TVs, Web cams, household security systems, and more.

When you have more than one device to connect to the Internet, you need a router. The router now becomes the end-point for the ISP. The router configuration defines a private internal network. The most common private network address begins with the numbers 192.168. What is important is that a private network IP address cannot be routed to the Internet. Thus, an outside hacker could see the router, but not the devices connected to its network. It is the job of the router to make sure that a request from a device to an Internet site receives the response. For example, if you have three computers in your network that are watching different YouTube videos, the routers make sure that each device only receives the data for the video that it is playing. When a device connects to the network, the router sends it the information it needs to connect to the Internet using DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol). The router also acts as a firewall to keep hackers from trying to penetrate the internal network. The challenge is selecting a router.

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Whether for business or pleasure, having a connection to the Internet is part of our daily life. What happens, if you don’t have a cable or WiFi connection to Internet? We carry a potential solution with us, and it is our cell phone. If your cell phone has a Web browser, it may act as a tether between another device and the Internet. Using your phone is a cost effective solution to purchasing a USB data card as a mobile connection to the Internet. Why pay for two services, when you already have one that can do the job?

Internet enabled featured phones and smartphones often support tethering to the phones modem using a USB cable, or Bluetooth. When acting as just a modem, your phone connects a single device to the Internet via the phone. It is similar to connecting to the Internet via a cable modem connected directly to your computer.

The modem’s job is to convert signals from one communications protocol to another protocol. Thus, the phone converts GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) or UTMS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) to a data signal required by a USB cable or for Bluetooth. For GSM feature phones, the problem is the speed of the Internet service.

GPRS is a GSM technology standard for sending data over a voice network. GPRS is an old technology, and only supports a maximum speed of 48 Kbps. EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution) is a newer version of GPRS that supports data speeds up to 128Kbps. However, the actual data rate is highly subject to loading of the GSM network. UTMS, however, operates on a separate cell phone band and supports much higher data rates. Costa Rica cell phone services support GPRS, EDGE, and UTMS.

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When you connect to the Internet, your phone, data card, or cable modem, you are assigned a unique IP (Internet Protocol) address. The human readable form is a set of four numbers that are separated by a dot, such as 200.198.10.105. When an Internet application, not just your Web browser, makes a request to another Internet site, the site name resolves to the destination IP address. This establishes a connection between your site and another site. Without that connection, the destination site could not send back an answer, such as a Web page. It is like making a phone call, your phone number and the other parties phone number form a unique connection that allows you to talk with each other.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigns IP addresses in blocks. Except for a few very large organizations, these blocks are assigned on a regional basis, much like each country has a country code for a phone number. Through the assignment process, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is assigned a block of IP addresses. Thus, Kolbi, Claro, Movistar, TeleCable, and other ISPs are assigned an IP address block. As a result, your IP address reveals the country from which you are making a connection. There are a number of Web sites that tell you the information revealed when you make a connection. I use What is My IP Address, as it provides a number of useful tests, such as a speed test.

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