Five things attackers can do on public Wi-Fi (and how to stop them)

Airports, hotels, coffee shops. The free Wi-Fi you trust most is the easiest network in the world to compromise. Here's what's actually happening.

Public Wi-Fi networks rarely encrypt the radio link between your laptop and the access point. That means a stranger with a $30 antenna can passively read every unencrypted byte you send — including session cookies that let them log in as you.

Worse, attackers run 'evil twin' hotspots that mimic real networks. Your phone auto-joins them, and now every DNS query, every API call, every chat message flows through a stranger's machine.

A VPN closes both holes. The tunnel encrypts everything end to end, so the radio layer doesn't matter, and DNS queries resolve inside the tunnel — never to the attacker's resolver.