There should be a law
There should be a law about an RV park advertising free Wi-Fi and when you get there and have to depend on it to do your banking, email, look for the next place to go or do some on line shopping. It ...
Forum Discussion
2oldman wrote:dyb wrote:I've done that on occasion, but I don't make a habit of it.
Is public wifi safe for banking ?
It's a question of odds. What are the odds you will be unlucky enough to have someone sniffing your activities in a campground? In reality, almost too small to measure. Everyone warns not to do it, but that still doesn't mean it IS statistically unsafe.
No, it isn't, and for reasons beyond sniffing traffic. Networking and security are my profession, and I don't connect my computer, or even my phone, to public wifi. Ever.
That said, if you really want to use the campground's public wifi, the safest way to do that is to have a wireless router capable of bridging wireless networks (that is, it's uplink will be the CG's wireless, and it broadcasts its own, secure SSID for your wireless network). I don't, off the top of my head, know of any consumer-grade wireless router that does this. I reflashed mine with DD-WRT for that particular purpose.
Using a mifi-type setup is more expensive, but it's easier (for most people) and safer than setting up a router to do wireless-wireless bridging. It's likely to be safer, and may well be faster. As many have reported, speeds on camp ground wifi are often awful (I'll comment on that in another post).
If you're going to use public wifi anyway, the best thing to do then is:
- Always make sure your computer is up to date on patches (especially security patches)
- Make sure your software firewall doesn't allow any external computers to initiate connections. You computer should not appear to be listening on any TCP or UDP ports. You can google this (it'll be specific to the OS you're using; Windows is different than Mac is different than Linux)
- Subscribe to a paid VPN service (don't use a free one; they have to make money somewhere, and they're probably making it by selling ads, selling your information, or in some cases, selling access to your bandwidth and routing other people's traffic out through your computer. That can be pretty dodgy traffic, too. Connect to the VPN as soon as you're on the CG Wifi and send all your traffic out through the VPN.
