[Best Guide] All Public WI-FI Risks And How to Safely Use Public WI-FI Without Getting ‘Hacked’ 2023

Wi-fi plays a very important role in this era, everything starts being digital day by day so everyone needs a large amount of data to surf on Internet surface, at that moment Wi-Fi become our need. Well, in public places like restaurants, airports, stations, etc. You can find Wi-Fi to use free of charge but are they safe to use?? In this article, you are going to see ‘all risks of public wifi‘, ‘How to protect yourself from hackers on public Wi-Fi‘ and much more in brief.

What is public WiFi?

Wi-Fi that is available to use publicly, this public available wi-fi easily found in popular public places like airports, coffee shops, malls, restaurants, railways station, and hotels. There you can access the Internet and surf it free of cost.

Public Wi-Fi is so common that we all never think twice before connecting to public wi-fi and we never care about risks until we found out how risky it is, because of a lack of awareness of our security. Well, we all love to use the free Internet that’s why we don’t care about our Informational data. Until once you realize how cybercriminals use public Wi-Fi to steal your credentials.

Is It Safe To Use Public Wi-Fi?

Absolutely not, it is completely unsafe to use public Wi-Fi, because you never know who is actually behind this Wi-Fi and what is their mindset to do with your connected device. Approximately 77% of people think that public Wi-Fi is safe as their own private internet connection. If you also think public Wi-Fi is safe to use then this article is purely made for you to understand what they can do and what actually hackers were doing.

Risks Of Public Wi-Fi

When hackers try to attack their victims or any specific target they adopt various methods to do it. You see all methods that hackers used to exploit public available Wi-Fi and get access to their victim’s systems.

Risk of Personal Information

This is the most important thing which you should have to protect, nowadays personal information is like an asset that you should protect. Personal Information comes in many different forms:

• Personal data
• Login credentials
• Financial Information
• Documents

If a hacker gets access to your system through public wifi, they can easily able to access your credentials like social media, banking, and other platform’s login details. If somehow they don’t get full access to the data on your computer but they still manage to get details you sending or receiving from the Internet. But it’s very easy to get full access to your system and credentials. We explore more about this how they get complete access, in this article.

Man-In-The-Middle-Attack

It is one of the biggest threats and very easy for hackers to find the best medium to get access to other systems. In this MITM method, hackers get a great opportunity to come between you and real Wi-Fi.

In this attack hackers present between the user and web application, so they know what are you doing and they can see each and every detail of you which is transferring between your system to online like login credentials. You can do this same just by using your laptop with a Kali OS. If you want TechDevilzone to make a detailed guide on “How to do MITM attack just using a laptop” then comment below.

Let take an example to understand it more clearly, Imagine you go to the hotel and their hotspot name is ‘Devil hotel’ which is unprotected but when you search for Wi-Fi, you get a lot of results and then you join ‘Devils hotel’, here you did the biggest mistake of recognizing misspelling and you connect to hacker system but you did not think twice because Internet works very well as excepted and it is free. Now hackers get into all your login information what you are doing in your system. But it’s too late and after some days you see your social media account get hacked, your bank details get leaked etc.

Packer Sniffing

In public Wi-Fi, many people are connected to one Wi-Fi. So, if hackers are also connected to the same wifi they can easily able to do eavesdrop on every data you send or receive using tools such as packet analyzers or packet sniffers even some tools are free to use but some are paid to use.

These sniffing tools allow you to view every data transmitted over a wifi network, which is unencrypted. Well, it all depends on you how you are using tools for your safety or to harm others.

Hackers have complete access to your browsing. So, the amount of damage they can depend on you what you browse online using wifi. I hope from now on you you know that choosing public wifi is not a good choice at least don’t enter bank details using public wifi.

Cookies Stealing And Session Hijacking

Cookies are small data files that contain personal information that browser collect from websites they visit. Cookies help to log in again without entering credentials. These are simple text files that hackers hijack, your active sessions are played an important role to it until you’re login your sessions are active and use it to enter your account later and Internet thinks it is you due to cookies that contain your personal details.

Chrome Browser has an extension that is widely used to enter any site using cookies:- EditThisCookie

How to protect it? see below point.

Unencrypted Connections

Nowadays most website comes with a support of encryption, so the data you send and receive is fully encrypted with a secured key. If somehow hackers get access to the network but they can’t manage to read it without the key to decode it.

Well not all website offer this encryption, if you want to see which website offer encryption and which not just see prefix before domain name which is HTTP for unsecured and HTTPS for the secured encrypted website.

• HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
• HTTPS: Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure

So, in public Wi-Fi If you are connected to an unencrypted website, it will be fully readable like plain text.

Malware Distribution

This is a way that after disconnecting public wifi hackers still manage to access your system by using their malware which is deployed to your system when you’re connected to public Wi-Fi. Malware is software that is designed to damage computers. Malware forms are:

• Virus
• Spyware
• Adware
• Trojan
• Ransomware

When you are connecting in public wifi and hacker is present there with bad intentions, they easily able to install malware on your system without taking any type of permission from you or your system. After some time when you disconnect from public Wi-Fi and use your private Internet still hacker gets access to your system because of malware that the hacker installed.

So, one question definitely arises in your mind is, How can any hacker Install malware on your system? It is very easy, there is a lot of unsecured websites that installed malware in your system. When you visit these sites, they automatically start downloading malware in the background with no permission and installed themselves. It all happens due to script, if you’re a coder then you know.

The Evil Twin Attack

In this attack, hackers create a similar access point to the real one and it is very easy to do just by downloading that website source code and doing only small changes.

It is very similar to a Phishing attack when you enter your details on that access point hackers can easily see your login credentials and use them later against you.

How to Download Source Code?

In TechDevilZone, we already shared a brief article on Downloading any website source code LINK

Phishing Pages: – Phishtank, is a website where you can see all reported phishing website.

Why do Hackers want to access your systems?

Hackers want your system to get your personal details so they can sell it or use it against you for money purposes, for do DOS attacks on different platforms using your system, use your system for mining, and for many more various illegal purposes. They remain anonymous while your IP/MAC address gets caught for that illegal purpose.

How to Protect Yourself From dangerous Public Wi-Fi?

If you don’t have much Internet data or you run out of data and you need to use public wifi, then there are several things that you should know to protect your personal information from hackers. If hackers can’t manage to make a connection with your system they move to the next victim because they are finding an easier target.

First, make sure you’re connecting to the right network.

Set your device setting to always ask before connecting to Network

This is a feature that you should be aware of, head over the settings to enable automatic connection to wifi and select an option to “always ask” before connecting your device to wifi. This keeps your device and your information safe. This is a basic thing you should know.

Don’t share your private Information

When you are connected to a public Wi-Fi network, make sure you are not sharing or revealing your personal data, as you have seen above, “hackers usually see what you are doing”, “what you are typing”. So, if you’re not logging on to any sensitive websites then hackers can’t find it. Try to avoid browsing, do not check your emails or other important things while connected on public Wi-Fi, this is a thing that most people must do to not regret later.

Use VPN Service

Virtual Private Network (VPN) not only helps you to be anonymous by changing your IP address but also provides a service to encrypt everything you send and receive over a wifi network. VPN comes in app form also. VPNs use many protocols like SSTP, IKEv2, L2TP/IPSec to hide your IP address. You effectively avoid hackers, cybercriminals, crypto miners, and even ISPs from collecting your logs of activity just by using VPNs.

In VPN, you get connected to a VPN-provided server over an encrypted connection. You get everything through Wi-Fi is fully encrypted and hackers can’t able to read it.

Use 2-Factor Authentication

There are many websites that actually deal with very sensitive information by using a security feature called two-factor authentication (2FA). This 2-factor authentication plays a very important role, before 2FA bypassing passwords is much easy which leads to more accounts hack.

Like in Google, after entering your username and password, Google Authentication sends a unique code to your email & phone number this is referred to as authentication. This helps you if hackers get your login details but still, they can’t manage to get access until they verify the unique code which is sent to your email address and mobile number.

Use HTTPS Protocol

If you don’t have access to VPN, then make sure you visit safe websites. HTTPS websites are the safest websites, remember HTTPS is present before the domain name.

HTTP is highly insecure and unreliable, it has a high chance to get exploited and all data is transferring between you and the server is not encrypted. While HTTPS is fully encrypted and encrypts every request you send to the page. TechDevilZone is HTTPS-based so, feel free to enjoy this website content 🙂

• Don’t download and Update any application or software on your system while connecting to public Wi-Fi.
• Use Cellular Data or Personal Hotspot
• Be Responsible Online
• Connect through ethernet cable
• Use cellular data

The best way to protect yourself from public wifi risks is to avoid them. Instead of public wifi use a cellular data connection or a portable hotspot. These methods give you a private connection which is much more secure than a public connection.

Quick Review What You Should Do And Don’t To Protect Yourself

Do:

• Don’t share private information
• Disable file sharing
• Visit only HTTPS sites
• Make sure to log out, to end your cookies lifespan
• Try to avoid public wifi as much as you can
• Use VPN

Don’t:

• Turn off auto-connect to wifi networks
• Avoid log in to important apps and using HTTP websites
• Don’t leave your wifi or Bluetooth on if you are not using them
• Don’t please don’t access financial or sensitive information related accounts of your

Things that every human being think:-

I know you don’t care about your data now because you think about what they can do with your data, we all think like this until we find out how they use our data against us. A big personality like Mark Zuckerberg and other professionals usually tape their cameras, speakers because they know these laptop components are simultaneously used for illegal things easily. Cassidy Wolf is one of the victim of hackers, read her story: Cassidy Wolf.

Conclusion:

The possibility of your data breach is more dependent on you, if you use more public Wi-Fi more possibility of your data gets breached. Even people get hacked and they don’t even know that they get hacked until hackers come forward and make any demand of money or anything else.

So, after reading this article, I hope at least you now know All risks of public wifi and how to use public wifi safely and in a secured way that is actually highly insecure. Just follow the above privacy measures to protect your important data.

I hope this article helped you!

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