Free Wi-Fi at cafés, airports and hotels is convenient — and a favorite hunting ground for attackers. On an unencrypted network, anyone on the same network can potentially snoop your traffic.
Five hidden dangers
- Man-in-the-middle: a fake hotspot intercepts your traffic;
- Session hijacking: stealing unencrypted login cookies;
- DNS poisoning: redirecting you to phishing sites;
- Malicious captive portals: demanding you install a 'certificate' or app;
- Traffic sniffing: plaintext protocols expose credentials in the clear.
The fix is simple: turn on a VPN on any public network so all traffic is end-to-end encrypted; prefer HTTPS sites; and disable auto-join Wi-Fi on your devices.
The golden rule for free Wi-Fi
The first thing to do on an unknown network: turn on the VPN, then log into anything. On an unencrypted network, typing a password is like reading it out loud in public.