We are out of town on a job. The extended stay room we have has a free high speed internet hookup. The manager says it is T-1.
My question is : Just how secure is this line? What I mean is can I send information home or to the home office without fear of someone “listening” in?
Not that I am doing classified work or anything, however I don’t want to braodcast to everyone what I might want to do with my wife when I get home.
The thing is on continuously and I didn’t have to enter a password or anything to access the service.
A T1 is a major line that connects to the backbone of the internet. It is the same line used by most large corporations and the line itself is as secure as anything an the internet can be. Use your normal common sense and you will be fine.
Here is a thorough description of T1 lines if you are interested.. The guy probably told you that to brag a little. A T1 is the smallest of the leases business lines but still has lots of bandwidths. The article has a list of faster types of lines that are also available. Generally though, he will just hear about T1 and the big brother T3 lines as types of major leased business lines.
T-1’ s are not exactly internet backbone material anymore. They are generally leased to medium sized businesses. From what I can tell, ISPs genrally deal with OCs (optical carriers).
Here is a listing of their speeds.
T-1 = 1.5Mbps
T-3 = 45Mbps
OC-1 = 51.85 Mbps
OC-3 = 155.52 Mbps
OC-12 = 622.08 Mbps
OC-24 = 1.244 Gbps
I remember seeing a diagram of BBC’s internet connectivity and they had leased out several big OCs.
To answer your question, yes it is secure, but no more secure than the rest of the internet.
A T1 is a hard-wired connection that is terminated on each end - so if I have a T1 to Sprint - we have a real line run between us with a CSU/DSU at each end - so the odds of someone “listening in” are pretty negligable - outside the hotel. Inside the hotel, that’s a different story.
Somewhere inside the hotel is a server or router handing out IP addresses so you can connect to the internet. Everyone in that hotel is in the same network connecting on that line. If I was in that hotel and bored, I have on my laptop a port sniffer and packet sniffer - very handy IT tools - not just for killing time in hotels but for actual network analysis.
What someone could do is scan the local network for IP addresses with a port scanner. This would tell me what IP addresses are in use, what ports are open on them, and I would use that to determine their OS, if it’s a printer or some other device, and thier relative security level.
What one could then is either try to attack your system using those ports (not that easy unless there is no security - Windows 98/95 or something) or run a packet sniffer on all your outgoing and incoming data. Even then it’s a lot of work - but they could collect the data, save it, analyse it, and pore over it later.
I 'm not a security expert though, as I just work with certain facets as needed so some of this is shakey, but your best bet is to run the latest version of whatever platform you prefer, make sure you are patched, and learn a little about security. Good luck!
