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That coffee shop with open wifi and zero password policy
Stopped at a place in Portland last week, free wifi, no login, no splash page, nothing. I grabbed my laptop and checked my bank account within five minutes. Later I realized anyone in that room could have been sniffing that traffic with a free tool. Public wifi without a decent VPN is basically asking for trouble, I don't care how convenient it is. Do you guys actually use a VPN on every public network, or am I the only one being paranoid about this?
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ryan3692mo ago
Over 80 percent of the traffic on the internet is already encrypted these days, so most of what you type is garbled junk to anyone else anyway. My bank app forces its own secure connection no matter what wifi I'm on, and honestly that's true for most real banking sites now. The whole "open wifi is scary" thing feels like leftover advice from 2012 when every site was plain http. Plus, think about it, if a hacker really wanted your info, they'd hit the coffee shop's router directly or use a fake login page, not sit there sniffing packets and hoping. I've used free wifi for years without a VPN and the only thing that ever happened was an annoying ad injection once. You're not being paranoid, you're just being extra careful, but the actual risk is way smaller than people make it sound.
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