Internet access in the hotel I’m currently staying at is ridiculously expensive (at £0.50 per minute) so until I actually start work tomorrow, I’ve been using public Internet cafes. The best value ones I have found in London so far are the £1 all day ones somewhere on Oxford or Regent Streets. I’m not excessively worried about computers that I have control of, but I am always concerned when using public computers, especially when you are logging into various accounts (email, blog, photo albums, and most particularly bank accounts).

I am not surprised that the computers in the Internet cafes are windows based, meaning that it already is more susceptible to certain security issues. The bigger thing that concerns me is that these computers allow anyone to install anything they like. This worked to my benefit, allowing my to install Skype, Firefox and to run Putty from my flash disk, but opening up this privilege also means that more malicious people could install any sort of sniper software, collecting passwords and account information, and potentially sending them to the user. One may have to be even wary of the owners of the café who could be harvesting this information for themselves (beware of what you pay for).

Fortunately I am informed enough to work out whether or not there is malicious software running before I give any login names and passwords, and where you should go to clean up traces of login names and passwords, but I wonder about those that are ignorant to the fact their identity could easily be stolen?