At the campsite, at the hotel: should you secure your wifi connection with a VPN?

As soon as you leave the secure cocoon of your house or apartment with your usual wifi box and strong passwords, you should take all the precautions to connect to an unknown wifi network. Whether you are in a restaurant, an airport, a hotel or a campsite, using a wifi hotspot is always a bit risky, whether it is open (without a password) or closed (with a password) . Indeed, you do not know anything about the owner and the box or the router to which you are going to connect. Malicious people can perfectly well create a malicious hotspot and siphon information on naive people who think they can connect to a simple free wifi.

Use a 4/5G connection as much as possible

So of course, the first instinct to have is simply to avoid connecting to an unknown wifi network and to use your smartphone’s 4/5G connection to surf or watch a movie. A simple connection sharing can be enough to supply the rest of the family with bytes if your plan allows it.

Abroad, 4/5G connections can end up being very expensive, especially if the offspring have a great time on tablets and computers. Access to a wifi network can save your data quota which, again, may melt like snow in the sun.

A VPN to secure your wifi connection

To surf in peace, it is important to equip yourself with a VPN (Virtual Private Network) or virtual private network, which allows you to encrypt your connection so that the communications which pass through the hotspot are completely unreadable, even if they are intercepted.

HTTPS secure, but not sufficient

Attackers can then create sites respecting HTTPS, but which are not the real sites on which you want to go

We often think that an HTTPS connection (with the little padlock before the URL) is sufficient to encrypt communications between the computer and a website. True, but there are risks here too. Admittedly, the HTTPS protocol, which is becoming more and more frequent, does indeed make it possible to encrypt data transfers, but it absolutely does not guarantee that you are going to the right site. Thus, by connecting to a malicious hotspot, it may very well redirect your request to a fake Facebook site also encrypted by HTTPS. Christopher Thiefin, SOC (security operation center) analyst at Hexanet, specifies that “certification authorities like let’s encrypt allow you to obtain HTTPS certifications for free. Attackers can then create sites that respect HTTPS, but which are not the real sites on which you want to go”. Once on the fake site, your information is in the clear and you can get valuable data extorted. If HTTPS is essential, it is therefore not sufficient.

The VPN reflex

To limit all risks, it is therefore necessary to use a VPN, which in addition to encryption of communications, makes it possible to avoid an exchange of information with the Internet service provider. By going through a VPN, you use the “pipes” of the hotspot to transfer your data in an unreadable way for spies and all your requests are made in a protected way.

A VPN to access its online services

A VPN also makes it possible to geolocate in one of the countries covered by the service provider. From abroad, this allows you to connect to your bank without putting it on alert when you simply want to transfer money from Albania. In addition, you can connect to your online services like Netflix, MyCanal or Spotify as if you were in France and easily take advantage of your subscriptions.

Free or paid VPN?

In order to surf hassle-free during the summer holidays, there is no need to invest in a VPN subscription over several years. The offers allowing you to benefit from a month of use satisfied or refunded can sometimes be enough for a few weeks of vacation. We can also recommend the VPN provider Mullvad, which not only offers open source software (which we particularly appreciate Digital), but is available at the flat rate of €5 per month, even for a period of 10 years. A commercial policy which very often avoids inconveniences at the time of tacit renewal… Generally, we do not recommend free offers which inevitably pose the problem of the financing of service providers. However, you can choose ProtonVPN, which offers a service that is certainly a little degraded (low speeds, few countries covered, etc.), but often more than enough for the two summer months.