Why You Really Need to Stop Using Public Wi-Fi

When you’re using open Wi-Fi, your communication is over radio in the clear. It’s trivial to intercept as data. 

It’s simple to basically set up your wireless card in monitor mode. And they have lots of tools available that you can download on the internet like Aircrack and Airmon, that allow you to basically set your wireless card in what we call promiscuous mode. So any of the packets that are being transmitted by radio through the air, you could decode and display on your computer. 

Now, if somebody is accessing their Gmail account and it’s using SSL, which stands for “Secure Sockets Layers,” you see the title padlock in the browser, then the attacker won’t be able to see those communications, because from point to point, it’s encrypted. But there’s lots of other types of communications where an attacker could potentially get not only access to your computer, but access to private information.

Instead of using public Wi-Fi, you should just get your own portable internet device, and configure it that you have to use a password like a WPA2 key, to connect to it. That’s the safest way. But if you must use open Wi-Fi, it’s a risk, unless you set up a VPN service. 

So what’s a VPN service?

It stands for Virtual Private Network.  You could get access to a VPN service for like $60 a year ($5 a month). What a VPN does, is anything from your client, whether it’s your phone, your table, or your computer, all the way to the VPN provider you’re using is encrypted so an attacker cannot eavesdrop on those communications, or infect the integrity of those communications.

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