Secure Your Customers’ Data Over Insecure Public Wi-Fi
With the availability of free public Wi-Fi in more and more places, employees who work remotely now split their time working from home and in public places like cafes, and hotels. This makes everything more convenient, but at what price? Many people make use of public Wi-Fi without knowing the dangers involved and so we would take you through how to secure your customers’ data over insecure public Wi-Fi.
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In a survey by iPass, it was discovered that 81% of the respondents to the survey have seen security incidents that are related to Wi-Fi in the past 12 months, and the incidents occurred in places like hotels, cafes, and airports.
By educating your employees on the dangers involved when using public unsecured Wi-Fi with this detailed breakdown of the three most common attacks they could be faced with.
Public Wi-Fi Risks
1 . Unsecured/Poorly Secured Networks
Unlike the networks with WPA2 security protocol, your employees’ connection to unsecured or poorly secure networks is not safe. The lack of encryption between the router and your employee’s device will allow for data sniffing to and from your employee’s device. This takes away privacy and opens up loopholes for an attack on your company or business. The worst part is unsecured Wi-Fi networks are so common and people are continuously connecting to them and sending sensitive information through those connections.
According to a study from Wandera, Wi-Fi routers that offer no security or poor security at most manage almost 70% of Wi-Fi sessions. The same study discovered that at least one employee of the companies that were surveyed has used unsecured Wi-Fi in a month. While it may sound like one employee can’t cause damage to the company, if the information that was sent was sensitive and about a customer, the attacker would have unauthorized information on one of your customers.
How to Protect Against Attacks Via Unsecure Networks?
Firstly, you can avoid connecting to unsecured networks as they are missing the signature padlock beside their name. connecting to poorly secured hotspots isn’t that easy and requires tools and good knowledge of the subject to be able to identify suspicious or outdated security certificates. You can choose to train your staff on this, or Your team could make use of LimeVPN to encrypt data if they must use the network, to ensure that the data remains safe and untouched by attackers.
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2. Rogue Networks
Many public Wi-Fi names are also known as SSIDs are named after the businesses that own them, alongside the words FREE and Wi-Fi. This is a well-known naming convention and attackers can use cheap equipment to deploy a similarly named network in the environment with the same password and even stronger signal strength than the real network.
Naturally, everyone would gravitate towards the network with the strongest signal strength, so the attacker’s fake network is the one that would be chosen most times.
By connecting to rogue networks, your team would be vulnerable to having their browsing activities monitored and recorded, and their traffic could be rerouted to phishing sites where login credentials would be stolen.
How to Protect from Attacks Via Rogue Networks?
Before connecting to a business owned Wi-Fi network, confirm the SSID with an employee just to be sure. If they can’t confirm the correct network, using a premium VPN such as LimeVPN would ensure that whatever data you send across the network even if unsecured would be encrypted and safe. This way, your team members would have a layer of security that keeps their activities private, and customer data safe.
3. ARP Spoofing
This is the most difficult risk to identify and is similar to the rogue network but unlike that, the devices are tricked rather than the users to connect to the attacker’s network. Once they have compromised your employee’s connection, the attacker can carry on with the man-in-the-middle attacks to track their browsing activity, and also reroute their traffic for login details phishing.
It’s even more dangerous as the attacker covers up their tracks to avoid any suspicion. They quickly record all the data they need and then send it to its target destination to create the feel of secure web browsing. No suspicions. Just as with other attacks, ARP spoofing isn’t difficult to execute as all that is required is the basic knowledge of networks, and free software to carry out the attacks.
How to Protect from Attacks Via ARP Spoofing?
It’s more difficult to protect against ARP spoofing as its undetectable visually. Even if the network’s SSID is cross checked by the business owner, they can’t tell if anyone else is pretending to the network. The only way to protect yourself in such a situation is to access the internet over an encrypted VPN server. Only the best would give you the security that you need, and LimeVPN is highly recommended for this task.
The Easiest Solution
Many business owners who are aware of the risk involved with their employees’ connection to public Wi-Fi resolve to curb the act by banning such connections altogether. As effective and easy as this sounds, it’s the least effective. Verizon states that employees ignore bans on public Wi-Fi regularly. It was found that 81% of office workers admitted to using public Wi-Fi even though there was a strict ban against it.
Employees don’t go against the bans for the mere pleasure of it. They do so because they need flexible working options and make use of every time they have whether in the office or after working hours. So it’s more realistic to help secure their connections than to prevent their connecting to public and unsecured Wi-Fi.
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LimeVPN has a plan that allows for multiple connections for your teammates so you all can stay secure. The standard and most secure AES 256-bit encryption is used to ensure that even if the attackers lay their hands on the data any of your employees are sending, it will only look gibberish; useless. So if you are looking for how to secure customer’s data over unsecured public Wi-Fi, here is the best solution for you.
Conclusion
It takes only one employee to make a mistake and your company can get hacked and unauthorized access granted. While they are different types of attacks with connections to an insecure Wi-Fi hotspot, you can easily avoid some while others are well hidden. The only way to ensure security at all times is to encrypt your connection and that of your team. Wi-Fi bans are common in most offices, but it doesn’t work. Instead of fighting a process that employees see as very convenient to finish their assigned tasks, give a more lasting solution that offers protection no matter what.
With LimeVPN, connections are secure irrespective of the Wi-Fi connection. This is because all traffic doesn’t go straight to the target website but first goes through the chosen server. The VPN server is like a tunnel that processes every request, part of which is heavy encryption. The best encryption algorithm now is the AES 256 and that’s what LimeVPN uses to ensure that no matter the tools your attacker uses, customer data would never be compromised.
Rachael Chapman
A Complete gamer and a Tech Geek. Brings out all her thoughts and love in writing blogs on IOT, software, technology etc
