SPOKANE, Wash. - When in a cafe using a public Wifi signal to surf the Internet on your phone or tablet, people typically don't assume there's a hacker nearby trying to steal your information. But it's that assumption that could get you into trouble.
John Mayovsky with Spokane Computing says you can never assume that any public network is safe. According to John, even if it's deemed secure and requires a password to get in, it's still possible to hack into your device.
John has a few tips to keep you safe.
Don't do banking or use your credit card to buy anything on-line when you're on a public network.
Make sure your firewall is up. A lot of times people take it down at home when file sharing between devices and forget to put it back up when they move to a public network.
You should never assume that a public network is safe.
Finally, use more than one password. According to John "Even if they just have your Facebook password, if you're using the same one for everything else, they're pretty much in."
One more thing to keep in mind, John says you're especially susceptible in hotels. While you may think you're alone in the privacy of your room, a hacker could be right next door collecting all of your private information.
Stay tuned for next week when we see if John is up to the challenge of using a public network to hack into one of our computers.
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