Recent surveys have shown that Wifi public hotspots are all vulnerable to attack by hackers.

There are two kinds of risks involved in using an unsecured hotspot. The first is that instead of connecting to the legitimate hotspot, you accidentally connect to the hacker’s hotspot which is setup to use a similar name as the one you wanted to use.  This way they may even steal your credit card info if you planned to pay for the hotspot. So be careful who you connect to and double check the Network name.

The second type of risk is called ‘man in the middle attack’ and is the most common form of traffic interception. The Guardian
once stated :  “the Watchdog team was able to access the email accounts of two members of the Watchdog audience, viewing everything the users were doing online, including their email and social networking activities.” This is done by capturing data packets sent over the air in unsecured hotspots. Using a VPN to create a secure tunnel between your PC and a VPN provider will prevent packet sniffing and data theft.

So be aware of the risks you’re exposing yourself to when using Wifi public hotspots !