The festive season is in full swing and, if you’re in the same boat as me, you’ll be planning your journey back home to spend the big day with family and friends. Alternatively, if you’re more adventurous, you might be looking forward to a winter vacation.
Either way, if you’re hopping on a train, you’ll no doubt be glad to see that most offer a free Wi-Fi connection. It’s handy, right? You can scroll through social media as you wind your way back home – or catch up on some YouTube video essays. However, these free hotspots are notoriously insecure, putting your privacy and personal data at risk.
The good news is that today’s best VPNs have the tools and tech you need to protect your data when using free Wi-Fi (and even your regular home network). Keep reading, and I’ll walk you through how a VPN is a must-have travel companion.
The risks of free train Wi-Fi
Let’s say you’ve found a seat on the train, made yourself comfortable, and now you’re a lengthy commute away from home. You open up your phone and see there’s a free Wi-Fi network available – and you connect to it.
Nothing out of the ordinary here, right? Unfortunately, despite how convenient these hotspots are, they’re often unsecured hotbeds of cybercriminal activity.
Free Wi-Fi connections don’t usually have the same security measures as the Wi-Fi you use back home. Typically, your data isn’t encrypted when you connect to these hotspots – and that means that anyone with a little know-how could compromise the network, intercept your data, and actively monitor what you get up to online.
This could be devastating to your overall online security and privacy. If you log into a social media account, for example, a snooper can see and record your login details (or any other info you submit during your browsing session), and potentially go on to use those credentials in future brute-force attacks. It gets even worse if you access a bank account or financial app – as you’re effectively handing over the keys to your finances to a hacker.
There are a few ways that bad actors take advantage of the vulnerability of free Wi-Fi hotspots. Here are the two most common:
- Man-in-the-middle attack (MITM): these attacks occur when a bad actor intercepts your data to monitor it, putting their device between yours and the Wi-Fi hotspot. Anything you write, search for, or submit will be visible to the hacker. The worst part? You might have no idea that they’re even doing it. They’ll log any credentials or sensitive data and then use it to launch phishing attacks, identity fraud, or even sell it onto the dark web.
- Evil twin: some bad actors take things further by creating a bogus network that imitates the legitimate one. They do so by renaming a router – which is criminally easy to do - and calling it something believable – like “FreeTrainWiFi”, and hope that you won’t think twice about joining it. If you do, however, you’ll be giving the hacker unfettered access to your exposed browsing sessions and data.
Shore up security with a VPN
Your next question is probably “Well, how does a VPN help?”, and it all boils down to encryption. Encryption is the process of rendering your data unreadable to third parties by scrambling it into an unreadable form – and it's a VPN’s specialty.
Wondering which VPNs really, seriously, prioritize your digital privacy? Check out our round-up of today's best secure VPNs.
Connect to a VPN server and you’ll be assigned a temporary new IP address and all of your data will pass through an encrypted tunnel as it leaves your device and heads to the wider internet. Any snoops taking advantage of free train Wi-Fi will see that you’re connected to the hotspot, sure, but be unable to leaf through your data – they’ll see a string of useless gibberish if they try to intercept it.
This means you can go about your usual browsing, and kill time on your journey, without worrying that you’re giving away your financial details and logins to someone looking over your digital shoulder.
Unblock new (digital) horizons
VPNs know how to have fun, too, and in addition to giving your privacy a boost, plenty of people use them to unblock geo-restricted content.
You probably know that Netflix offers totally different content to folks in different countries – someone in the US won’t see the same shows and movies as someone in the UK, for example. This might seem unfair, especially if that show you planned on watching during your train journey isn’t available in your location, but Netflix has to abide by licensing agreements that dictate where it can and can’t broadcast certain things.
A VPN gives you the power to hop these restrictions, however, and it’s as easy as pie. All you need to do is pick up a reliable streaming VPN and connect to a server in a country where the content (or streaming platform) you want is available.
The VPN will then assign you a new IP address based in the same location as the server you chose, so the sites and services you visit will see it and think you’re physically there, too, and subsequently serve up that region’s specific content.
A VPN’s unblocking power comes in handy in all sorts of situations, including:
- Unblocking streaming content: whether you’re into Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Hulu, or even YouTube, a VPN allows you to make the most of your subscriptions and unblock content from around the world (without leaving your seat on the train).
- Get around censorship: if your government prevents access to certain news outlets or apps, using a VPN to connect to a server elsewhere allows you to reclaim your digital freedoms and enjoy a freer, less censored, internet.
- Bag some bargains: just like streaming content, some sale prices are restricted by region, meaning you can use a VPN to geo-hop and shop around for big savings – because everyone does their best impulse buying on the train, right?
