An American couple sitting in Rosette Cafe approached me and asked me where is Park Royal Hotel. Embarassingly, I did not have chance to explore Cameron Highlands as I’ve been busy blogging in the same cafe. The reason they asked me was that they saw the hotel name pop up in their list of available WiFi hotspot on their Sony Viao notebook.

I went back to my notebook to check …

It looked funny because the ‘hotspot’ is not really a hotspot. It’s just another ad-hoc WiFi connection, most probably from a notebook.

So I went back and advised the couple that it’s not really hotspot provider and do not connect to it.

A quick Google search shows articles that mention that there are unscrupulous people out there setting up their notebook and pretending to be some hotspot by choosing a name like “TMNet Hotspot”, “AirZed”, “FreeWiFi”, “ParkRoyale” etc hoping to fool unsuspecting users. They can have their notebook hidden unsuspectingly in their backpack.

Once you connect to these ad-hoc hotspots they can present you with authentic looking websites and steal your passwords for GMail, PayPal, Banking sites, etc.

So be careful!!

What to look out for?
Be very careful of tell-tale signs like these:-


wireless icon shows a “notebook”. It should be a router symbol (see above first picture).


ad hoc or Device to Device connection

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