Introduction
Everybody loves free Wi-Fi and free internet access in general. When people go on a vacation somewhere into another country, city or town, most of them prefer to stay in hotels because of they have free Wi-Fi access. However, free Wi-Fi can be quite dangerous, especially in hotels.
The Dangers of the Hotel Wi-Fi
As we have written in the first paragraph, hotel Wi-Fi can be quite dangerous. Why is that? Let me explain this to you, because most people have ideas about the internet, which are quite wrong. The internet is a very dangerous place. There are tons of cyber criminals all over the world who are looking for naïve people to give them out their details. By acquiring those details, the criminals can get access to several things, which we will detail in another paragraph of this article.
Why is hotel Wi-Fi more dangerous than other free Wi-Fi access points? Because most free Wi-Fi access points have some kinds of verification systems while hotel Wi-Fi does not have those or those verification systems in hotels are on such low levels that hackers can easily access them with ease. Hotel Wi-Fi is, in most cases, accessible for even guests, so you don’t really have to book a room in order to access Wi-Fi.
But is shared Wi-Fi dangerous? I have explained it to you that hackers and cyber criminals can access your computer and acquire your details, however, I haven’t explained to you how they are planning to do so on Wi-Fi networks. Wi-Fi creates connections between several computers. So if anybody connects to the Wi-Fi network can easily abuse and access to your computer too if the connection is not secure. In the case of hotels, the connection is unfortunately not secure. So, if a hacker wants to access your computer the only thing he or she has to do is to either book a room in the hotel in order to access the free Wi-Fi or just park his car somewhere near the hotel, so he can connect to the Wi-Fi access point as a guest. And, as I have written previously, after doing so he will be able to gain access to your personal details that are on your computer by using different programs and software.
Cyber Crime
Cyber criminals, one of the most famous type of them are hackers. Hackers do many things. There are those who try to generate money from their illegal activity, however, there are hackers who does not want money. The latter is pretty different than other persons in the world. They don’t really want money for their activity, they mostly want retribution from the government or they want to change the world.
World-changing hackers could be a quite interesting topic to discuss, however, it wouldn’t be so relevant in this article. So, let’s talk about hackers who want to steal our details in order to generate the income of theirs. Firstly, let’s see how they will get money from accessing our computers. It is pretty easy, however, most people are thinking this is an urban legend. Most people think that hackers are not really smart, or there are no such thing as hackers and only Hollywood created this term to make their movies more interesting and futuristic. However, there is such thing as hackers and they are fortunately or, unfortunately (differing from the point of view) are pretty smart.
Cybercriminals generate their income from stealing your details, you know that since I have mentioned it several times in this article. However, what you don’t know how they use those details. One of the most important details a person could have is the credit or debit card details. If somebody steals it online or from your computer, they could do much damage to you and to you, especially to your economical state. Hackers mostly steal these kinds of details, however, as it is quite hard to steal money from a credit or debit card, they need other information too. For example, your date of birth, mother’s maiden name, and so on. If they are very smart they could even get access to your personal documents in digital form, such as your driver’s license.
