Recently I moved to a condo which offers free WIFI for all the residents. Naturally, I want to take advantage of this and save some money, however, I am a little bit skeptical about the level of security. Is there any free software or any alternative that will prevent hackers/sniffers from getting my personal information and stop them from seeing what I am doing i.e online banking, bill pay etc. I will really appreciate your input.
How to secure my computer on an open WIFI connection?hijackthis
Keep in mind that WiFi security secures only the link between your computer and the access point. The access point decrypts your traffic and sends it on to the open internet unprotected.
WiFi security does little to nothing to protect your computer from attacks originating elsewhere on the internet. Those are the vast majority of attacks. Also, anyone sharing that AP, possessing a password for that AP, has open access to route packets to your machine on the local network, behind any firewall the condo puts up.
Your web transactions with entities over the internet, such as banks, should be protected by SSL. This is independent of any WiFi security. It operates end to end, protecting packets as they traverse the internet. Do get used to verifying the URL on the screen when you have SSL (https) connections. Do pay attention to cert warnings, view the cert and see what's up when you get such a warning. Are you connection to www.mybank.com/accounts.html or www.mybank.com.accounts.com? The latter would be a phishing site.
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