It’s your best friend’s birthday but you are enjoying the best holiday of your life, few thousand miles away.
Good News:Your laptop is connected to the free wifi available in your hotel room and you just ordered a beautiful gift.
Bad News: Some hacker is probably using your credit card details to buy some gifts for himself. It’s alarming how easy it is to setup fake wifi networks and potentially steal sensitive data. And you are exposed to this threat the most while travelling.
Hackers set up fake free WiFi hotspots in public places and then sniff on every bit of data that is transfered. For you it is a free Internet source that looks and works like any normal wi-fi hotspot. However, the hacker who owns the network can end up with a lot of information that belongs to you; like passwords, credit card details, documents, personal pictures etc.
Thankfully it’s not that difficult to protect yourself. Here are some tips to keep your browsing private even at public places.
- Keep “Automatically Connect to Open Networks” wi-fi setting off all the time. On your phones and tablets as well.
- Don’t just connect to any open Wi-fi network. Find out or look for advertised Wi-fi in that area. Don’t connect to anything that looks suspicious.
- Use a secure VPN service all the time you are out of home or office to encrypt your data. (VPN Makers has some affordable plans). Most VPN services work on Android, iPhone and iPad as well.
- Turn off shared folders or password-protect all of them. Even public folders or guest folders could be used to inject a spyware on your system.
- Keep your security suite/anti-virus system up-to-date.
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