Nowadays, we can get free Wi-Fi connections everywhere — in restaurants, cafés, hotels, office buildings and even in public spaces and on public transportation.

With the increasing speed of our everyday lives, we tend to sandwich our private internet activities in between our public engagements, prompting us to use these free wireless networks to send private emails, shop online and even do online banking.

Yet, these free Wi-Fi connections may have hidden costs attached to them. Some hackers might be lurking to tap into your private data through the Wi-Fi connection – using hacking software such as Wireshark, available for download along with a comprehensive usage tutorial on the net – and use it against you later, Indonesia ICT Institute executive director Heru Sutadi warns.

These hackers may be people who happen to be sitting in the same café or staying in the same hotel as you, or somewhere else within the reach of the public Wi-Fi connection you are using, he says.

Wi-Fi sniffing cases are often reported in the United States, whereby hackers have several times tapped into hotel Wi-Fi connections to steal guests’ private data, or set up an access point pretending to be Hilton, as quoted by a wired.com article.

“After hackers steal your data through the Wi-Fi connection, typically, they will wait for two or three months before they actually use it to benefit themselves, such as by maxing out your credit cards or draining your bank account,” Heru says.

These hackers may also infiltrate your social media accounts or the data stored on your smartphone or laptop in order to exploit embarrassing documents — such as sexual or sensual images — in order to blackmail or extort you later, says Heru.

It is easy for these hackers to blackmail you since they have obviously gained access to your email account through their Wi-Fi sniffing activities, Heru adds.

Most commonly, people get emails in their inbox, with the sender telling them that she or he knows they keep some pornographic images or images of themselves and significant others in compromising positions and demand that these people send US$2,000 to his or her Bitcoin account, according to Heru.

That these hackers use cryptocurrency to extort their victims just makes it harder for the police to trace them, Heru says.

“Previously, when [con artists] still ordered their victims to transfer money to phony bank accounts, it was way easier for the police to track these con artists down by checking on the history of these fake bank accounts and with whose ID card they opened these accounts,” Heru adds.

Well, the internet has made criminals more sophisticated somehow.

So far, Heru says few reports have been made in Indonesia regarding Wi-Fi sniffing cases, but that by no means indicates that such cases never happen in the country; perhaps this has more to do with the Indonesian public’s lack of awareness of internet security matters.

To illustrate this lack of awareness, about 70 percent of urbanites surveyed in Indonesia’s nine major cities were still not aware of matters related to password protection, according to Pratama Persadha, founder and chairman of the Communication and Information System Security Research Center (CISSReC) in 2017.

Meanwhile, cyberattacks are a common occurrence in Indonesia — the National Cyber and Encryption Agency reported 12.9 million such cases nationwide in 2018.

“To avoid Wi-Fi sniffing, the IT administrators of these public spaces have to encrypt their wireless internet connections. Yet, the tricky thing is, as guests, we cannot tell whether a public Wi-Fi connection is encrypted or not,” says Heru. So, it is better to take protective measures to ensure our data privacy when using these networks.

So, when you are on a business trip, when you have to file certain reports using your email accounts or make bank transactions or have to post something on your social media, better use your private internet connection instead, whether using your portable Wi-Fi or tethering your computer network to that of your mobile phone, Heru advises.

Then, whenever you use these free public Wi-Fi connections, make sure you log out of all your personal accounts. Use the free Wi-Fi to access sites that do not require you to log in to enjoy their contents, such as online news portals, or when you want to watch YouTube videos for leisure just watch them without logging into your YouTube account, which has been integrated into all of your Google accounts, says Heru.

These little steps may appear inconvenient in the beginning if you are not used to them, but they are simple enough to take and are enough to protect yourself from unforeseen hacking.

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