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Free public Wi-Fi is both a blessing and a curse. It offers incredible convenience when you are out and about and need to quickly check your email or look up directions to a restaurant. But if you are relying on public Wi-Fi connections for work and more in-depth everyday tasks, knowing the risks associated with public connections can keep your identity and data well protected. Tech Security Expert Michael Robinson of Cheap SSL Security spoke with SHEFinds.com about the scary reason you should never log on to public Wifi (or why, at the very least, you should take precautions when you do).
Hackers can put themselves between you and the connection point, which is one of the biggest threats with free Wi-Fi, according to Robinson. “As a result, rather than communicating directly with the hotspot, you end up sending your data to the hacker,” Robinson says.
Whether you are sending an email to a friend or quickly checking your bank account and moving money over to another account, everything you do on a public Wi-Fi network is open to being stolen by a hacker.
“Any piece of information you send out is also accessible to the hacker—emails, phone numbers, credit card information, business data, and so on,” Robinson says. “You've effectively handed over the keys to the kingdom to a hacker once they have the knowledge.”
“Despite countless signs, headlines, and attempts to inform, many people still don't understand why connecting to free Wi-Fi, regardless of what you're doing online, is a very dangerous situation,” Robinson says. “Although you might think, ‘Well, I'm not checking my personal email or logging into my bank account; I'm only checking the sports scores,’ keep in mind that everything you do on a public Wi-Fi network is NOT safe. Any knowledge you exchange or gain access to across these networks is essentially lost.”
But what if you don’t have much of a choice and need to rely on public Wi-Fi from time to time? Robinson says there is one way to secure your connection with an additional layer of encryption.
“Allow the ‘Always Use HTTPS’ option on websites that you visit regularly from your phone, including any and all sites that require you to enter any form of credentials while browsing the internet (most websites that require an account or credentials have the "HTTPS" option somewhere in their settings),” Robinson says.
While it’s still best to avoid accessing accounts that contain private and compromising information while you are using a public Wi-Fi connection, this added step can help cut down on your risk of being hacked while using an unknown network.
