Quick! Do you remember what “wi-fi” is short for?
It means “wireless fidelity.” It’s hard to imagine being without the mobile convenience that wi-fi provides for our digital devices. However, “fidelity” only refers to the quality of signal, not its safety.
Vistage speaker and IT Security expert Mike Foster warns that the convenience of your device automatically connecting to previously visited networks wherever you go brings both convenience and peril.
Here’s how it happens, step by step:
1. The coffee shop you frequent has a wi-fi network you’ve connected to previously and you probably allowed it to “remember” the shop’s network “name.”
2. Having told your device to “remember” the network’s name, when you leave the coffee shop, your device will continue to look for that network by name regardless of how far from the coffee shop you’ve moved the device.
3. Here’s where the convenience turns into peril. Bad actors can set up wi-fi access points using the same name of your coffee shop or even worse, “home”, if you’ve named the network in your house by that name, as many of us do.
4. As you move about with your phone or other device, the bad actors simply wait for a device looking for a list of common wi-fi network names. Once your device requests a connection to their network of the same name, it connects, and they have access to your device.
Mr. Foster goes into greater detail on this threat, and as always offers simple, but effective ways to protect yourself and your team.
If you have remote workers at “home” or others who travel frequently to the same places, then you and your it staff should take steps toward Outsmarting the Invisible Threat: How Cyber Attackers Hijack Your Wi-Fi Connections and How to Protect Yourself”
