Be Wary Of ‘Juice Jackers’ When Traveling

Airports, airplanes, lounges, restaurants … they’ve all caught up to technology and offer free public charging stations for your smartphones and tablets.

But are they safe?

There is a new Consumer First Alert ahead of the holiday travel season, warning travelers of nefarious characters who practice ‘juice jacking.’

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That is, they are hackers who steal sensitive information from your phone in public places. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office is warning it has recently caught hackers with equipment.

“When that plug goes in, if the malware has been loaded onto a module that's connected on the other end of that USB cable, it loads itself onto the phone and can monitor the phone in real time, download information from the phone, sometimes clone the phone completely and you don't even have to be using it,” said Luke Sisak, Deputy District Attorney of Cyber Crimes.

As tempting as these free public charging stations might be, avoid them and instead use an AC power outlet or your own portable charger.

And there’s rarely compensation.

“We see companies, that when they get compromised, they offer one year of credit monitoring. I think that's a joke,” said Curt Esser of Esser Consulting LLC. “Once people, these scammers, have their data, they have it for their lifetime.”

“It's not a single answer, but we should be able to be doing better than what we're doing right now, we are ten years behind with our data and privacy breach laws,” says Lara Sutherlin, Wisconsin’s Administrator of Trade and Consumer Protection.