In fact, the small business or home oriented wireless networks are low security or open security networks. This increases the chances of observing the data flow easily than high security WPA/PSK systems. The above two situations can well utilized by a professional hacker to hijack your network session. But the firesheep extension is easy to use even for a normal user. This addon can be installed as an extension in your firefox browser and it observes the surrounding wireless networks to find the best one to hijack. This allows the hacker to login as the user.
But there are preventive measures to avoid being attacked by firesheep. Blacksheep is another addon which helps you to scan machins installed with firesheep. BlackSheep does this by dropping ‘fake’ session ID information on the wire and then monitors traffic to see if it has been hijacked.
