Friday 19 December 2014

Preventive Measures to Keep Your Data Safe on Wi-Fi Networks at Public Places



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. 

You must know that it is remarkably easy to peep into other’s data or to steal username and password over a public Wi-Fi. Thus, you must not take a chance. That doesn’t mean that you should avoid connecting to public Wi-Fi. It’s true that you must avoid performing your finance related tasks over a public Wi-Fi. However, for regular browsing, you must set your device settings to achieve the appropriate level of security before getting connected to a public network.


Turn Off Sharing

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

 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

Use HTTPS and SSL  
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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