Dear Geek,
I was sitting in my local coffee place of choice with my laptop, using their Wi-Fi. I was about to log into my bank account to check if a payment had been put through, but I remembered that a coworker had told me I should not be using public Wi-Fi for things like that. Is this an issue? Will someone steal my money?
Sincerely,
Don’t Steal My Money!
Dear Money,
On an open Wi-Fi network like the one in the coffee house, hackers can snoop onto the network to see what you’re doing, or even use keystroke recording programs to learn passwords.
When you connect to an open Wi-Fi network, the network is generally unencrypted, you can tell this by the fact that you don’t have to enter a passphrase when connecting. Your unencrypted network traffic is then clearly visible to everyone in range, and people are able to see what unencrypted websites you are looking at.
If it’s something like online banking, I would wait until you got home. Anything like checking the news or the weather is fine, but anything like banking or online shopping can be risky. It’s better to be safe than sorry!
If you have a question for our Resident Geek, send it to: geek@tbyd.ca.
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