This report is from our sister station WTHI in Terre Haute, Indiana.
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) – A new warning from the Better Business Bureau. This one involves free wifi.
More and more places offer free wifi, but that service may also give hackers back door access to your data.
The BBB offers these tips to help keep your information secure.
Learn how computer encryption works. Encryption scrambles your information so it’s much harder for others to gain access to it.
If you are logging into a site, always look for “HTTPS” in the URL. The letter you’re looking for there is S, it means the connection is secure. Unlike websites though, apps don’t have that indicator. The BBB says using certain apps on unsecured wifi is not advised.
As a general rule, if you don’t need to enter a password for the wifi hotspot, it’s probably not secure.
It’s all about the passwords…do not stay premaritally signed into accounts, and log-out after each session. Also, use different passwords for different sites. If a hacker figures out your password for one site, that would give them access to all sites that use that same password.
Last, make sure your browser security is up to date. Basically, if Chrome asks you to run an update…do it.
