It's been a quiet weekend, Internet malfeasance-wise, so in place of emerging threats the handlers have some advice.

Since this is traditionally the start of the summer travel season (at least in the Northern hemisphere), I felt an infosec travel advisory was in order. Many of you will be traveling for business or pleasure, and will end up using the Internet services in your hotel. Keep in mind that more often than not, these connections are completely unprotected from the outside world. If you're bringing your own machine (or your work's machine) be very careful - this is not your local LAN. At one chain of hotels I often stay at while traveling, I am assigned a publicly addressable IP address with no discernible security infrastructure in place.

Besides outside threats, your system (and more importantly, the data contained therein) is at risk from internal attacks. POP3/IMAP/HTTP credentials can easily be sniffed, and man-in-the-middle attacks are trivially performed by your neighbor. Any file shares you've set up for your home/office LAN use are now available to several hundred hotel guests - make sure you're implementing proper host-based security. This point is even more applicable for those of you attending SANS training or any information security conferences.

This isn't ground breaking, and it isn't rocket science. However, it's all too easy for the keepers of the gates to forget that best practices and defense in depth concepts apply to them, as well.

"I Went To $SECURITY_EVENT and all I got was owned" T-shirts will not impress your peers.