Tips for securely using a public wifi

Using a public wireless hotspot is very useful when traveling or while your away from home. However, there are somethings you need to be aware of while using a wireless point.

All information that you are sending to the wireless router is in the public to whoever can receive it. This can also be a gateway to your computer. Following these tips will increase your security and privacy while using wireless access points.

While the public wifi owners may pass your information through a firewall, it only protects you from the world, not those that are using the same wireless router you are. Those users could either unintentionally or intentionally infect or attack your computer.

Fortunately for users of windows xp and beyond there comes a built in firewall which is fairly good for most situations, however if you want some more security there are several free and paid firewalls.

Also many of these offer suits that contain both antivirus and firewalls. I don't recommend the suits as they are often bloat software and cause more harm than solve. DON'T USE MORE THAN 1 ANTIVIRUS AND FIREWALL AT A TIME. Using more than 1 of each kind could cause your system all kinds of problems. Below is a few recommendations of what I consider the top software at this time.

For Firewall there is ZoneAlarm. Which offers both a paid and free version differing in features, either should suit the basic needs. Comodo is another excellent firewall packed full of features which is a free firewall.

For antivirus programs there is a number of options. On the paid side there is nod32. Which offers the fastest and most lightweight antivirus.

For free there is Avast and AVG. Avast offers many more features but is more resource intensive than AVG.

Evil Twin routers are routers setup by a hacker trying to get your data. They may pass your information onto the real router so you won't notice or give a you temporary down page after you have entered your data.

There is 2 things you need to do to handle this first I recommend disabling the wireless zero configuration. This services tends to be more annoying than useful as it automatically connects to the nearest open router every few minutes, which can be seamless for someone surfing but any data transfers it can cause problems. Also it could jump from the legitimate router to the evil twin router. Secondly is to verify with an employee of the area what the name of the router really is so that you connect to the correct router.

A Virtual private network (VPN) allows a person working to logon their home or company network as if they were using a computer from there. The VPN automatically encrypts all data that is sent from the computer to the company/home network and then is sent to the Internet from there. There is still a risk if your company/home network doesn't have a high level of security protecting your data, but this is a great way to protect your data from snoopers that may be listening near the public router.

If you don't have a VPN server at home or your company doesn't offer it, you can subscribe to a service such as HotSpotVPN or HotSpotShield. At the time of this article HotSpotSheild is offering 3GB a month of free VPN service.

When Checking email make sure you do a secure login which is using SSL, this is not done by default and your password is often sent in the open. Check your settings in your email client for the login with SSL setting. For web-mail such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail you can access the SSL by typing in https:// instead of http:// also check down at the bottom of the browser window for the little lock to indicate a secure connection.

Email is not design for security in mind, so if you want to make sure the only person that can read your message is the intended recipient than encrypt the message using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). Which can be integrated into your email client for automatic encryption. For files and documents I recommend using Truecrypt.

It is best to avoid entering sensitive data on an public network but if you must make sure use enter it on secure sites. Sites that are using SSL and web-address starts with https:// rather than http:// also there is a lock in the bottom status bar of the browser indicating that the site is secure.

This is commonly forgotten and is often a way for anyone to gain access your computer and copy your data.