Because it’s unsecured essentially…
They write
We’ve all heard it: “Don’t use Starbucks/hotel/any unsecured wifi connections” because…all sorts of bad things will happen. But what happens? How does it happen? What are the chances of it happening? What can you do to protect yourself?
The Perils of Unsecured Wifi
First, imagine you are a thief and you want to break into houses. You could go door to door to look for broken locks, or you could go to a neighborhood that doesn’t believe in locks. That neighborhood is any place that uses an unsecured wifi. A thief could be anyone in the same hotel as you, anyone in the hotel’s parking lot, any other fellow author writing the great American novel at Starbucks. You don’t get any notification that anyone looked at your stuff. You will never know.
Here’s how unsecured wifi works: Information that you send and receive is delivered in chunks of information called packets. When you use unsecured wifi, those packets can be intercepted and reorganized into readable information. I’m not going to link to it here, but there are simple free apps for PC, Android, or iOS that you can use to capture and organize this information. Anything, from your login credentials to the pages you are looking at, can be intercepted and saved.
We’ve all heard it: “Don’t use Starbucks/hotel/any unsecured wifi connections” because…all sorts of bad things will happen. But what happens? How does it happen? What are the chances of it happening? What can you do to protect yourself?
The Perils of Unsecured Wifi
First, imagine you are a thief and you want to break into houses. You could go door to door to look for broken locks, or you could go to a neighborhood that doesn’t believe in locks. That neighborhood is any place that uses an unsecured wifi. A thief could be anyone in the same hotel as you, anyone in the hotel’s parking lot, any other fellow author writing the great American novel at Starbucks. You don’t get any notification that anyone looked at your stuff. You will never know.
Here’s how unsecured wifi works: Information that you send and receive is delivered in chunks of information called packets. When you use unsecured wifi, those packets can be intercepted and reorganized into readable information. I’m not going to link to it here, but there are simple free apps for PC, Android, or iOS that you can use to capture and organize this information. Anything, from your login credentials to the pages you are looking at, can be intercepted and saved.
UPDATE (4/12/2017, 12:20 p.m.): A diligent reader points out: “Dropbox encrypts all traffic between a computer and their servers with SSL, the same technology that’s in place when we log on to our online banks. So if I install Dropbox on my laptop, any file I put into a folder there is synced with the Dropbox servers completely encrypted. Yes, the nefarious hackers could still grab the data packets from the air, but it would be encrypted gibberish.”
