The hidden price of free public Wi-Fi

While free wireless Internet is nice to have while enjoying a double espresso in your favorite coffee shop, it comes as an absolute necessity when visiting foreign countries, both for business and leisure. In fact, many travelers consider free wireless Internet access more important than room service, good breakfast, or hotel’s location, according to a study.

No wonder that almost all hotels today provide hotel Wi-Fi access to their guests. However, the convenience of being able to browse the Internet for free while sunbathing by the hotel pool has its own price: your privacy.

Hotel Wi-Fi security – does it even exist?

Hotel Wi-Fi security is pretty lax, and the reason behind it is very simple: your hotel’s job is to offer you convenience and comfort, not cybersecurity. So typically, they put little to no effort in protecting their guest network.

In some cases, to start using hotel’s Wi-Fi, you’ll be asked to enter your room number and a password created for that particular room. However, most of the time the responsibility for the overall network security falls on the shoulders of one weak password, which is basically the same as having no password at all. Some hotels skip the authorization step entirely, allowing anyone to join their network.

The lack of simple protection and proper data encryption, along with the large number of potential victims, is precisely what makes wireless networks wide open to cyber attacks, identity theft, and data snooping.

The biggest threat to your privacy is the ability for a cyber criminal to insert themselves as a secret intermediary between your device and the connection point. In such case, any information that you send or receive over the Internet passes through the hacker.

Malicious actors, such as the infamous DarkHotel group, also like to use unsecured hotel Wi-Fi connections to distribute malware. This group has been successfully targeting business travelers for over a decade. By using hotel Wi-Fi in luxury hotels around the world, hackers distribute malicious files via phishing emails, created individually for each victim and tailored to be highly convincing.

So basically, each time you connect to an unsecured wireless network, you are putting your private data at risk of being exposed. If your hotel’s Wi-Fi is on a cyber criminal’s radar, they can use a variety of techniques to invade your privacy. This article lists the most common hacking methods and explains how hackers employ each of them to snoop on their victim and, steal their identities or sensitive business information. I strongly recommend to read it.