Is the internet connection provided by these cablewalla’s secure?

I have my doubts. My first experience on the lack of security they provide to customers came within 1 month of my being online on their network. I met a guy on my own local network in the Faridabad city (who later became a friend) and he actually gave me my passwords of my login to the OS, to my mail ids. In fact he even told me all that all the passwords stored in Internet Explorer were available with him. Thank god I did not do my online banking through Internet Explorer; otherwise he would have got access to my bank account! And if you know your net supplier as well as I did, there was little hope I had to find the guy responsible for it (if he was not a friend but someone who wanted to do it on purpose!). He then told me to get a decent firewall which would prevent simple hacking attempts. Even after installing the firewall, he was still able to do pretty nasty stuff with my PC! Well, nice to have such a guy as a friend… Because we later had a lot of fun on that network. We enjoyed free bandwidth, faster connections doing some very basic stuff with the fragile network we had! The owner came to know about it much later. By that time I had left the city.

We still talk about this same stuff pretty regularly. My current network on Sify seems to be a bit more secure (on the expense of features… even my pings and tracerts are blocked!) but my old network still sucks. I am so scared now that even though I am running behind a firewall, a full time antivirus, I try to avoid using my online banking facility as far as possible. Keyloggers, Trojans, worms and viruses, there are shitload of stuff that makes a network fragile. And network guys who don’t even understand what Linux is are not the people you had trust for your private information.

Now thinking about the people who do online trading on these same lines, the situation sounds more serious. There are people doing share trading, maintaining online accounts. And most of these people are middle aged old timers who are new to this genre and mostly rely on the operators who are generally computer institutes leftovers. I have engineer friends (computer engineers even) who do not know what a firewall is. I have MCA friends who would not run Linux coz they don’t know how to install it!

Of course there are smart guys but most of them would rather use the situation for their advantage considering the attitude and mentality of the people who are running the networks. My old cable walla was a brilliant example of this hypocrisy. I remember the time I worked for 2 months in NIIT Gurgaon Development center. The network administrator was such an idiot that he kept the network down for 6 hours on the onslaught of klez. Our all efforts to suggest him to use the SARC released vaccine fell on deaf ears. Apparently all the PCs were running without the antivirus that came with the systems (the installer was interestingly present on the HDD of each computer itself!). This is Indian IT scene! Sucks…