Home and public wi-fi hot spots are firmly a part of everyday life, more so since COVID where many work from home as well as those public spaces setup to help relive the monotony of being stuck at home.
Whether you are at home or in a public space establishing some good habits to ensure security of the data you throw over the Internet is worth focusing on.
- Use a VPN. If you have been working from home, you might have been attached to the corporate VPN, well, even for home use such as shopping and banking using a VPN for any financial transactions might seem a little over kill (you are at home after all and not using a public hotspot), but forming the habit of doing so could save you, and it’s not hard is it?
- Make sure your home router is using the highest level of security it can which should be at least WPA2 (there is a new standard in the pipeline so keep an eye out for it)
- Use a good Wi-Fi pass key for your home router
- Don’t leave the default router SSID set, often this shows the make and/or model number of the device – can be useful to someone.
- Treat every public Wi-Fi hot-spot with absolute caution and consider it compromised – maybe a little paranoid, but how do you know? That means use VPN connections, try and ensure nothing unencrypted travels over that connection; watch email clients as some will send mail server connections unencrypted. Essentially, avoid doing anything like banking while using such a connection
- You could even treat your own home router as compromised, and considering the number of attacks its not a bad idea. In those cases, ensure your firewall and malware protection is up-to-date on every device. For further details on this concept look up Google’s articles on ‘Zero Trust’.
Public Wi-Fi Tips
