Firesheep, the all too easy-to-use Web snooping tool, continues to expose the disaster that is modern Web site security. Sooner or later, a lot of people are going to lose a lot of valuable information to hackers using Firesheep and scream to high heaven about it. Then, and only then, will Web server administrators start offering HTTPS all the time.
You, however, don’t have to be one of those victims. There are already tools that will help protect your Web wandering from Firesheep. One of the best of these, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) HTTPS-Everywhere, has recently had a major upgrade.
As far as I’m concerned, this latest version is a must for anyone who uses public Wi-Fi spots and doesn’t have the luxury of using a virtual private network (VPN). HTTPS-Everywhere forces many popular Web sites to let you connect to them with Transport Layer Security (TLS); Secure Sockets Layer (SSL); or TLS/SSL over HTTP (HTTPS).