Technical Tuesday: How To Stay Safe On Public Wi-Fi

Many of us today are surrounded by free or public Wi-Fi. Burt that is not the necessarily a good thing.

In our modern day society we are all attached to our phones/ Mobile devices and basically our entire lives are on them. Meaning that our banking information our bill pay systems and our private emails/ text are all right there.

Personally, I try to never use public Wi-Fi if its at all possible. There are a few reasons for this But for the purpose of the post I am going to state the top 3 dangers and also give you some options on how to stay safe.

The first on is pretty obvious and honestly many people are aware of this danger but they ignore it and that’s the Man in the Middle attack.

This type of attack is one that most people understand as Identity Theft.

The hacker in this case has intercepted the information that you are sharing on public Wi-Fi.

 

*Another words.*

You decide to stop and get a coffee and that coffee shop has public Wi-Fi. So you connect in order to save your data while your are there you also check your email and see that you have a friendly reminder to pay your credit card bill. so you click that pay now link and pay that bill.

Now unknown to you there is a hacker in that same coffee shop and he has set up a trap. He noticed that there is a small flaw in the security of the Wi-Fi at the coffee shop and now he has all the information to take over your identity and you will be none the wiser until you notice money missing.

So here are your first few tips.

1 Do Not use a Wi-Fi that doesn’t have a password to login.

2 Do not pay any bills or connect to your bank account or login to your bank account, unless you are totally 100% sure that that connection through public Wi-Fi is safe.

3 Do not Store passwords for your bank accounts or credit cards on your phone.

The second way that people get attacked is a Rogue Hotspot.

Now I personally hate that name cause not a lot of people use it commonly and there for it doesn’t make sense to everyone. So we are going to simplify this .

A Rogue Hotspot is quintessentially a fake hot spot. That has the same name as the place you are in.

so for example: you get a coffee and you dont want to use your data. you look for an open Wi-Fi and see one with the name coffee shop that has full bars. so you connect… and Then “BAMM YOUR NOW IN ZOMBIE LAND” (yes, that is a quote from Disney’s Zombie Land. it fit so accurately that I am borrowing it) -but seriously… not kidding your phone is now connected directly to that hacker and the chances are he is watching everything you do.

Creepy Right?

(yeah, I think so too)

So here is where I am going to sound really redundant for a moment… but I am also really very lazy and so your going to do the work for me… Scroll up… To those 3 tips and read the first one…

Got it…Good.

The third ways relates back to the whole post on Juice Jacking so If you are ignorant to what that is please click here. 

Now… if your still following along and your wondering if there is a way for you to stay completely safe online and on the go and you have some tech skills and want to then go ahead and look into a VPN (if you have to read this note saying that a VPN is a Virtual Private Network. Then please contact your Internet security) Some times these are included in your internet security packages. Such as the Norton 360.  If you are interested in learning more about Internet Security please visit this Link.

 

As always Leave a comment below if you have any questions or comments and Happy Computing. 🙂