Nowadays, all major public places like airports, railway
stations, cafes, mall, etc. are offering Wi-Fi connectivity to facilitate wireless communication
for their customers. These public Wi-Fi networks are usually available for free, and thus people
tend to use them. However, these networks are not very safe, especially if you
are off guard. The reason of insecurity is that tons of people connect to the
same public network and thus your data is at risk.
You don’t know the other people connected to the network and
their intentions. Thus, you must not take the risk of sharing the same wireless
network with strangers, especially when you are off guard. Even if the public routers are
password-protected or have firewall protection, these are not entirely secured.
Turn Off Sharing
By keeping the sharing on, you can enjoy easy sharing of files
across different devices. You can even allow a remote login to your device from
another computer on your network. Doing all these is safe in your home network
but in a public network, it can turn out to be very risky. Thus, before
connecting to a public network, you must turn off the Sharing options.
In Windows: To
turn off ‘Sharing’ in a Windows device, follow the following route:
Open your 'Control
Panel'>'Network and Internet'> 'Network and Sharing Center'> 'Change
Advanced Sharing Settings'
Once here, turn off the following
• File and printer
sharing
• Network discovery
• Public folder
sharing
In OS X: To turn
off ‘Sharing’ in an OS X device, follow the following route:
'System Preferences'> 'Sharing'
and then uncheck all the boxes.
Enable Your Firewall
Nowadays, almost all operating systems come with a basic
firewall and this piece of software is very effective in keeping away the
unwanted users from poking at your device. The firewall is turned on by
default, however before connecting to a public network, you must reconfirm that
it is turned on in your device.
·
To enable it on a Windows device, follow the
following route:
o
Control Panel > System and Security >
Windows Firewall
·
To enable it on a Mac device, follow the
following route:
o
System Preferences > Security & Privacy
> Firewall
Make sure that your firewall is enabled. Apart from having a
firewall for your router
and modem, it is
also advisable to keep the firewall of laptops or desktops enabled all the
time.
Use HTTPS and SSL Whenever Possible
When you connect to the website over HTTP, a lot of plain
text is exchanged over the Wi-Fi
network you are connected to. Thus, if there is someone in your network
with the right skills and bad intention, then he or she can easily sniff out
the traffic to your device and can steal the desired information.
Thus, the best way to keep the data protected is to keep the
information encrypted. If you visit a website over HTTP, the data of that
website is not encrypted. But the HTTPS website and SSL web applications save
the data in encrypted format. Thus, whenever you are accessing very personal or
financial information over a public wireless network, you must always access
websites over HTTPS and web applications over SSL.
Many sites such as Facebook, bank websites, Gmail, etc. do
it automatically. However, still you must personally check the address bar of
the URL and confirm that it’s not just HTTP but has the ‘S’ along. Thus,
whenever you are visiting a website that will be sharing sensitive information
such as your Gmail account, Facebook page or your net banking site, you must
see if it’s over HTTPS. If the ‘S’ disappears then, immediately log out.
You must take the especial care when you are connected to a
public Wi-Fi network.
Here if possible manually type the ‘S’ for every site you are visiting so that
even if you feed your email address in some website it get encrypted. In that
way, even if a hacker is sniffing on your traffic he will not be able to track
down anything.
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