Presenting the findings of its own world-wide WiFi hack experiment, Prague-headquartered Avast, the manufacturer of the world’s most famous antivirus applications, said London scored the worst of the three European cities analyzed in the experiment but do considerably better than a threesome of Asian metropolises included.

“In that experiment, our specialists flew into nine cities around the world,” described Avast representative Marina Ziegler.

According to Filip Chytry Avast’s virus analyst, many routers that are public use default passwords enabling hackers to obtain private data broadcast through the network including e-mails, passwords and browsing history.

“Many routers are either wholly unsecured or have really poor or even default passwords,” Chytry said. That is hardly difficult. Every every student can do that.”

Skilled hackers can perform a similar operation remotely through the net with indistinguishable results.

The vulnerabilities are of an even more serious concern as the experiment revealed that a large part of the internet browsing still occurs via unguarded HTTP sites that show all data to the attacker including usernames and passwords with no encryption in the shape of a plain text.

The scenario was the most serious in Asia were 97 per cent of sites was found to run the HTTP protocol that is poor. For comparison, one quarter of the European traffic and just one third of the US was found to run during the HHTP sites that were dangerous.

“If you’re transferring your data via the HTPP protocol, for example for those who own a website, which you believe does not need to be fixed correctly, you’ll be using your e-mail and your password to log in,” Chytry described. “And with the HTPP those data might be read as plain text with no encryption as well as the qualifications may be utilized in various systems. Even though everyone lets you know that you should not be using the same qualifications for distinct services, the truth is that the majority of folks do just that.”

The analysis additionally found that internationally between 80 and 99 per cent of users would connect with no second thought to an entirely unsecured public WiFi hotspot. Residents of San Francisco and Barcelona proved to be the most careful with only 80 out of 100 users. London fared somewhat worse with 83 out of 100 users.