What is a Man-in-the-Middle Attack?
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1. Evil Twin
FREE_WIFI_COFFEE
2. SSL Strip
Downgrade Attack
3. Session Hijack
Token Interception
Deep Dive: Threat Encyclopedia
1. The Evil Twin (Rogue Access Point)
An Evil Twin is a fraudulent Wi-Fi access point that appears to be legitimate. Attackers create a hotspot with a credible name (SSID), such as "Coffee_Shop_Free" or "Airport_WiFi", to trick users into connecting.
How the VPN Helps: When you connect to an Evil Twin without a VPN, the attacker can see all your unencrypted traffic. With a VPN, an encrypted tunnel is established immediately. Even though your data passes through the attacker's hardware, they only see scrambled ciphertext, making the interception useless.
2. SSL Stripping (Downgrade Attack)
This technique allows an attacker to downgrade your connection from the secure HTTPS protocol to the insecure HTTP protocol. This removes the encryption layer provided by your browser, exposing passwords and credit card numbers as plain text.
How the VPN Helps: A VPN encrypts your data at the network system level, independent of the browser. Even if the attacker successfully strips the SSL/HTTPS layer from the website, the data is still wrapped inside the VPN's encryption (like AES-256), preventing the attacker from reading the contents.
3. Session Hijacking (Sidejacking)
When you log in to a website, the server gives you a "Session Cookie"—a temporary token that proves who you are so you don't have to type your password on every page click. If an attacker sniffs this unencrypted cookie from the airwaves, they can import it into their own browser.
How the VPN Helps: This is often called "Sidejacking". A VPN prevents this by encapsulating the entire session, including these sensitive cookie tokens, within the encrypted tunnel. The attacker cannot identify or extract the token from the stream.