Have you ever been walking down the street and come across a local coffee shop with a welcoming sign that says, FREE WI-FI. Well, what a great time to go get a cup of coffee, check your Facebook page, post a few Instagram photos and do some online banking with your banking app. Do you see anything wrong with that list? Never mind the fact that you probably shouldn’t even be on Facebook or Instagram on a public Wi-Fi connection, but you should most certainly never be online banking on one.
Yet a new study found that 27 percent of people surveyed have done their online banking and other sensitive activities on a public Wi-Fi connection in the past three months. A whopping 40 percent had no clue that an open public Wi-Fi connection is not a secure connection and that data can be compromised. In this age of faster, better, more convenient technology people are more ignorant of it than ever. Part of the problem is the “it will never happen to me” mentality. People get complacent and comfortable and that’s when they become sloppy and not careful.
You should never access online banking or any other personally sensitive website with your data in them from any connection that is not secure. It’s very easy for hackers to be on the same network where they can gain access to your browser and all it’s data, including passwords, URL’s and other sensitive data. It’s even questionable to access social media through public Wi-Fi, especially if you have a lot of the same data in those accounts, such as emails and passwords.
“People should really be checking their bank account activity to see if there are any withdrawals and to flag suspicious activity,” said Polacheck. “If they have a secure password and if they change their password every 90 days, which is recommended by experts, their information will be safe, since the bank has encrypted their information.”
What do you think of this study? Do you check your online banking from public Wi-Fi? Let us know in the comments below or on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.
[button link=”http://www.ksl.com/?sid=35718111&nid=148&title=dont-use-public-wi-fi-to-access-email-banking-aarp-warns” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: KSL[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
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