How many times have you bothered to take any precautions when using Wi-Fi in public places? A Kaspersky Consumer Security Risk survey done by B2B International and Kaspersky Lab this year says that that free connection harbors hidden risks but apparently more than a third of the users do not take any additional precautions when logging on to public Wi-Fi.
Getting online is quite easy this days but many of this hotspots are not keen on the protection bit for the users, which even the users are either not concern or do not know the potential problems that can be caused.
In the Survey, 34 percent of users said they took no special measures to protect online activity using a hotspot, while 14 percent were happy to bank or shop online using any network that came to hand and only 13 percent take the time to check the encryption standard of any given access point.
In a Wi-Fi access point, it is possible for one to see what you are doing on your devices as it is a window to the internet for all the devices that are connected to it. Every request from a device goes through an access point, and only then reaches the sites that users want to visit.
Having no encryption of communications between users and the access point makes it ease for a cybercriminal to obstract all the data a user enters, including data sent to a bank, or an online store. This doesn’t mean that a connection with a password will make things better, Kaspersky says that cyber crimes happen to such connections as well as one with a secure https-connection between the required site and the user’s browser.
Kaspersky Lab proposes the use of secure connections to access points. They say that only this will greatly reduce the risk of the traffic being intercepted by cybercriminals. However, when users are planning to use sites which demand personal information such as usernames and passwords, this basic precaution must be joined with additional protective tools.
