If you travel for work, you're in pretty good company.
Americans make 210 million business trips a year, and many
road warriors use the computers in those hotel business
centers. Well, now they've become prime targets for
thieves looking to steal your identity, your passwords,
emails, and even your credit card numbers.

Hotel business centers offer some 9.8 million business
travelers a week a place to keep in touch: a mini-office
away from the office.

Unidentified Man #1 (Hotel Business Center User): They
have Internet connections, copy machines, fax machines.

Unidentified Woman #1 (Hotel Business Center User):
Whenever I travel at hotels, I make sure they have a
business center there.

LAUER: But are these public computers safe?

Unidentified Man #1: I'm no more concerned about
information being hacked in the business centers than it is
on any other computer I use.

Unidentified Woman #2 (Hotel Business Center User): I
would never use a hotel for anything that has to do with my
personal checking account.

Unidentified Man #2 (Hotel Business Center User): If
you're clever enough, you can basically tap into any
computer you want.

Unidentified Woman #3 (Hotel Business Center User): I
would not use that for personal and banking.

LAUER: But not everyone is so cautious.

Mr. JIM STICKLEY (Computer Expert): So the plan today is
to monitor the computers in the business center, and this
is all it's gonna take.

LAUER: Armed with a key logger, it takes just a few
seconds for security expert Jim Stickley to hijack the
computer in this hotel business center.

Mr. STICKLEY: And that's it. I'm now recording everything
people type.

LAUER: And it takes no time at all for unsuspecting users
to reveal their most confidential information.

Mr. STICKLEY: What I want to do is show you what we were
able to record while you were doing this.

Unidentified Woman #4 (Hotel Business Center User): Oh,
whoa! Yeah.

Mr. STICKLEY: So there's your login. There's all the
passwords you typed.

Unidentified Woman #4: All my passwords.

Mr. STICKLEY: Surprised?

Unidentified Woman #4: Yeah, really surprised.

Mr. STICKLEY: So you can see here you went to MySpace.
And what's that one there?

Unidentified Woman #4: That's my bank account.

LAUER: The software works by capturing every keyboard
stroke a computer user makes silently and invisibly. The
victim never knows their security has been compromised.

Mr. STICKLEY: I can see if they were logging into an
account. I can see the user name they type, the password
they type. Basically anything they did on that computer, I
was watching.

Unidentified Woman #4: It's very unsettling that someone
can track exactly what I'm doing, have access to my bank
account, have access to every other site that I log in on.

Mr. STICKLEY: And everything you did, every bit of history
that you have on this computer.

LAUER: So with business travel continuing to increase and
identity theft at an all-time high, travelers are warned to
never let their guard down, no matter where they are.

Mr. STICKLEY: The hotel computers are at risk because
they're not really here to provide security to you. By no
means are they saying this is secured and you should use it
for confidential or secured transactions.

LAUER: And Jim Stickley is a security expert with
TraceSecurity.

Jim, welcome back. Nice to see you.

We talked to the Hotel and Lodging Association. They said
they're aware of the risks but they can't be eliminated.
So bottom line is, should people avoid public computers
altogether, not only in the hotels?

Mr. STICKLEY: Oh, you don't avoid them, but don't be
using them for anything that's gonna have confidential
information: bank accounts, anything where you're gonna
use your user name and password.

LAUER: Well, let's just explain what you did again. You
attached a key logger to this computer. How big a device
is it?

Mr. STICKLEY: Oh, they're pretty small. I mean, that big.
(Spreads finger and thumb about two inches) It sits
right at the computer itself. You're never gonna see it.

LAUER: And it allows you to record everything that is
typed on that keyboard.

Mr. STICKLEY: On the keyboard itself.

LAUER: So when you hear people say, 'OK, I used a hotel
business center but I went to a secure Web site'--one of
those Web sites where the thing comes up and says, 'You are
about to enter a secure Web site,' it's encrypted--this is
not a safeguard against that.

Mr. STICKLEY: Absolutely not, and that's a big, big
confusion for people because they go, 'Well, it's a secured
site, so I don't have to worry.' The stuff is actually
being logged the minute you type those keys. It's not
being done over the network. Therefore you're at risk.

LAUER: Is there anything you couldn't have recorded or
gotten off of that computer when someone sat down to use
it?

Mr. STICKLEY: No. We can record everything.

LAUER: You can record everything, and then it would take
you how long to use that information to basically ruin them
financially?

Mr. STICKLEY: Very--I mean, the next day.

LAUER: If you've got someone watching right now, Jim, and
they're saying, 'Wait a second,' the red light just went
off and they said, 'I used one of those hotel business
center computers three months ago, I wonder if my personal
information was stolen,' what would you say to them?

Mr. STICKLEY: Three months ago, you're probably OK if you
haven't noticed anything already happening on that account.
You'd probably want to change your password immediately.
If you've done it just recently, go home, use your secured
computer, change that password, and then watch your account
to make sure nothing happens.

LAUER: But what you're saying is generally speaking if a
thief is gonna take the effort to go in there and record
your information off a public computer, that thief is gonna
use that information real quickly to get the biggest bang
for his buck.

Mr. STICKLEY: Absolutely. They want to use it before you
change your password.

LAUER: Yeah. It's scary stuff. It's amazing how much
we're learning in this computer age, or at least how much
you're teaching us.

Jim Stickley, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

Mr. STICKLEY: Thank you.

# # #