Harvard Business Review strongly advises against public Wi-Fi

The Harvard Business Review have published an article advising of the dangers of using public Wi-Fi. Of course, your business Wi-Fi, home Wi-Fi and many secure networks you use carry limited danger of being hacked but it’s the hotel lobby, airport lounge and coffee shop Wi-Fi that put us at risk of losing our personal data such as passwords, financial information and private pictures and videos.

You can read the full article here but in the meantime here are their top tips for staying safe:

• Don’t use public Wi-Fi to shop online, log in to your financial institution, or access other sensitive sites — ever
• Use a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, to create a network-within-a-network, keeping everything you do encrypted
• Implement two-factor authentication when logging into sensitive sites, so even if malicious individuals have the passwords to your bank, social media, or email, they won’t be able to log in
• Only visit websites with HTTPS encryption when in public places, as opposed to lesser-protected HTTP addresses
• Turn off the automatic Wi-Fi connectivity feature on your phone, so it won’t automatically seek out hotspots
• Monitor your Bluetooth connection when in public places to ensure others are not intercepting your transfer of data
• Buy an unlimited data plan for your device and stop using public Wi-Fi altogether