There are many coffee shops, fast food restaurants, airports, and hotels that offer free Wi-Fi to its customers. However, free connectivity means that the activities of individual users are open to be seen by anyone on that network. Hackers can redirect the users to phony websites and collect information on the PC. Worse yet, the computer can save that hotspot and joined it again automatically in the future. Thus, it is especially important to have some security measure applied to the computers that will connect with hotspot.
There are
many ways to take precautions. There must be a hardware firewall. Do not use
the Internet for any other activity than simple browsing—not banking, not
paying, or receiving money of any kind online. One should not even log into
email accounts because the passwords used may be replicated. Look for
legitimate networks instead of connecting to random hotspot. Do not open shared
folders because one may accidently upload malware onto the personal network.
Last, do not select the option for automatic connection, but manually select
the hotspot even if one must do that again next time. There are several options
on some operating systems that put a certain status to certain type of Wi-Fi—work,
home, or public—and only allow certain access to the computer. It is still
useful to follow other precautions rather than relying on the computer system
to do the job.
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