The famous comic, Groucho Marx once remarked that a four year old child could understand a report he started to look at, but as he read further and found he couldn’t understand it, he said, “run out and find me  four year old child.”  Well, Betsy Davis isn’t four.  She is seven, but it is still pretty impressive that a computer savvy seven year old could find the instructional information she needed to hack into a Wi-Fi system and then hack into a public Wi-Fi system all in a mere ten minutes and fifty-four seconds.  Fortunately, Betsy is not a criminal hacker, but was enlisted as a part of a security experiment to see how easy it was to hack into a public Wi-Fi network and steal information from people using the network.  All of this begs the question as to how safe are you when you use public Wi-Fi?  The bad news is that most people are not pretty safe.  The good news is that by following a few precautions, you can enhance your safety significantly.

TIPS

Whatever electronic device you are using connect to a Wi-Fi network, whether it is a computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone should be equipped with security software.  In addition, you should have encryption software so that your communications are encoded.  You also should go to your settings and turn off sharing.  In addition, you should make sure that your firewall is current and turned on.  Finally, you may wish to consider using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which enables you to send your communications through a separate and secure private network while you are on a public network.  A good VPN that you can use for free is CyberGhost which you can go to by clicking on this link.  http://www.cyberghostvpn.com/en_us