Safe Wi-Fi Habits
The final part in our three part series on creating foundational cybersecurity habits is developing safe wi-fi habits. Keeping your data secure is always the goal behind these foundational cybersecurity habits. You can spend all the necessary efforts in creating strong passphrases, and combating every phishing attempt that comes your way. But if you don’t follow through on this last principle, you could potentially just hand over the keys to your data security.
The final cybersecurity practice discussed in this series is good Wi-Fi habits.
How to Make Sure Your Wi-Fi Habits are Secure
The goal of these blogs is to help keep cybersecurity simplified. We are constantly trying to be conscious of the balance between being as secured as possible and habits that the everyday person can actually implement.
The goal is to mitigate the risk to a comfortable level. With that in mind, we really want to focus in on two areas:
- Lockdown home network with guest Wi-Fi; and
- Avoid public Wi-Fi at all costs.
What are Benefits of Adding Guest Wi-Fi
The easiest way to explain the benefits of guest Wi-Fi is to look at it as a separate network within your home. When you create a Guest Wi-Fi, you essentially have two networks. The main network is strictly for your priority devices. For the most part, this will just be your personal and work laptops and computers.
The guest Wi-Fi becomes your second network, which is where the more vulnerable and less important devices will live. This network is for everything else like smart devices (TVs, Refrigerators, Thermostats, Doorbells, etc.) and tablets. This also includes when friends come over and ask to connect to your internet. Since the more vulnerable devices are on a separate network, segmented from the main network, you minimize the potential of a cyber-criminal infiltrating your priority devices.
How to Set-up a Guest Wi-Fi
Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have the ability to create a guest Wi-Fi for free. There are several articles already available to show how to set these up. Here is an easy to follow guide through Hello Tech.
Is Public Wi-Fi Safe?
With the home network on lockdown, the other area to be conscious of is avoiding public Wi-Fi. Public wireless internet are open networks with limited to no security protocols in place. These can be relatively easy for a experienced hackers to manipulate. Hackers have the ability to create their own hotspot that mimics the public Wi-Fi internet. If you accidentally connect to the hackers network instead, they will be able to monitor a lot of your activity. Even opening the possibility of them gathering account credentials.
If you are in a position where you must use a public network, there are a few things you can do. The easiest step is ensuring your device is protected by antivirus software and all of the firmware on your device is up-to-date.
You can also be extremely conscious of the sites you are visiting and apps you are using while on that network. If you are not accessing priority or sensitive information, you can drastically reduce the risks.
The only other thing to be conscious of is to avoid downloading any software while connected to that network. Downloading malware is one of the big risks to these open networks, so just be extremely conscious of that potential threat.
Contact Us
If you have any questions, or would like some additional advice on how you can build on your foundational habits, please CONTACT US. We are always happy to help!