5 Must Follow Tips to Stay Safe on Public Wi-Fi

There are few offices, malls, and other places which offer free wi-fi hotspots. People can easily connect to their wi-fi network and start web surfing. It saves our mobile data and gives faster web surfing experience. But, these kind of wi-fi hotspots is not safe. Hackers always try to exploit the weakness of this kind of networks to steal personal information of other internet users. Sometimes, using this kind of free wifi hotspot can end up with a hacked Facebook account or hacked bank account.

Most of the times, these free networks are created by hackers just to steal credit card information of users. So, try to protect yourself.

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There is various kind of security holes may exists in our system that can leak our secure data. So, we should always try to cover all those security holes before using these kind of public Wi-Fi. And always avoid doing any kind of money transaction over these public networks.

In this post, I am listing few things which you must check and follow before using any public wi-fi hotspot.

1. Don’t Set Automatically Connect to Wi-Fi Networks

Automatically connection to a network can save your time, but it may be harmful. It is a good practise to manually verify the network and then connect to it. Sometimes, hacker creates this kind of network with the name of some coffee shop or carrier name. So, you need to check whether the network is original or fake created by the hacker.

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2. Turn Off Sharing

At the home network, we share our devices and folders with other computers. Some people also allow remote login from other computers. But this kind of settings must not be there for the public network. When you are going to connect to a public wi-fi hotspot, turn off this sharing.

3. Enable Firewall

Most of the operating systems come with an inbuilt firewall that keeps unwanted intruders away. If you are not using this firewall and your firewall is off. Make sure that you have turned the firewall on while working on the public network. These settings can be found under Control Panel -> System and Security -> Windows Firewall.

4. Use SSL Connection on all websites

Regular websites run over HTTP connection that exchange data in plain text. But most of the websites dealing with secure data now use https connection. This connection prevents hackers sniffing your data. Gmail, Facebook and Twitter like popular websites now use https. But few websites still run on HTTP. You can use https everywhere on chrome or FireFox to make sure your security. This extension forces all HTTP connection to https connection.

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5. Never do any kind of transaction

Although you are using the firewall, https and another kind of security practises, it is not recommend using transaction over these public wi-fi hotspot. Hackers always work hard to exploit all possible weakness of the network to get sensitive information. So, you should never use your bank details or credit card details on this kind of unsafe networks.

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These are few must follow tips while connecting to a public wi-fi network. If you have any question in mind, you can ask us via comments.