You might already hear a lot of times that you should not open your PayPal, bank account, and even your email while using a public WiFi as it poses a number of risks. While you might set up your home WiFi to be encrypted, you don’t know if you are connecting to a public WiFi. One of the possibilities is that some people might be monitoring your online activity unless you know how to protect yourself.
Take a look at the following risks when connecting to a public WiFi:
Unencrypted browsing is public
As WiFi uses radio waves, radio waves are anything but direct. This means that anyone within the range can see what you’re doing online if they’ll use the right software. Without protection, anyone can see every site you visit, the text you send out, and your login information for various sites.
With such danger, having a protection is very important. At home, you have the ability to encrypt your WiFi network in order to prevent snooping by making all of your traffic unreadable with a key. With a public WiFi, it is usually not encrypted. One simple way to determine it is when you type the case, you don’t need to type a password in order to connect. But this doesn’t mean that you are defenseless.
Your fellow users may be infected
Another risk on a public WiFi network is malware. A certain Your coffee shop might be running an operating system without any malware protection. This will put your computer at risk of infection. That’s why you have to make sure that you’ve got a firewall running when you connect to a public WiFi network. In Windows, you can set all public WiFi networks as “Public” when you’re prompted in order to turn off your computer’s local file sharing and block most network traffic. This is the same way if you connect through a VPN. Have malware protection also.
The possibility that a WiFi network is a trap
Sometimes, free WiFi is just a trap to steal your data. So, if you are connected to a WiFi network and have no idea whose network it is, beware. It just exists to entirely to steal your personal data.
For a number of years, setting up a WiFi network is very simple that being taken advantage of scammers to steal passwords and other personal information. Therefore, the next thing that you encounter a network called something like “Free WiFi”, without a password required and no welcome screen, it is possible that it is a trap.
If you connect to these types of networks, you might think that you’re connecting to the Internet normally. However, there’s a risk that you’re falling for an elaborate phishing scam and you won’t be able to tell. In the process, you could be entering your email username and password into a fake version of the site that you are visiting. This will then be saved by the scammer.
To protect yourself from such networks, connect to WiFi networks only if you know who’s running them. Also, try to ask business owners what’s the name of their network to ensure that you’re connecting to something legitimate.
