Apartments offering free Wi-fi

[Edd]

We're looking at an apartment building that's a mix of commercial and residential spaces. None of the apartments are even finished being built but we were taken on a walkthrough anyway because the footprints of all of the units are marked out with steel studs. They are offering alot of modern touches, free wi-fi among them.

They are promising the wi-fi will be very reliable, partly because the commercial spaces will be utilizing it too so it needs to be solid. I'm still skeptical but my real concern is security. It feels dumb to do my banking online with this kind of setup. I've never heard of an apartment building offering this and I can't get opinions from residents because nobody can move in there yet. Does anyone have experience with this?

 

[Geoff]

I think your concerns are much ado about nothing. Your banking isn't done in the clear. It uses https: Your neighbor isn't going to be able to watch you type in your password. If you really care, you can direct all your internet traffic down a VPN. I do that when I'm in China since the Chinese internet blocks most things I tend to want to access. When you have a tunnel where the packets are encrypted with 256-bit AES, it's private. I VPN to my company network in Denver but you can use pay services for a few dollars per month. There are also lots of free services to do web proxy but you get what you pay for.

 

[Edd]

Geoff, I've understood less than half of what you've said but I clearly need to do some research.

 

[Geoff]

Geoff, I've understood less than half of what you've said but I clearly need to do some research.

As part of my tech job over the last decade, I've had to become an expert in communications security. I do banking, credit card, amazon.com, and PayPal over public WiFi without giving it a second thought.

I do a ton of business travel so my machine has the same risks you would face in an apartment where they give you free WiFi. The risk on public WiFi is that somebody can hack into your machine.
* Make sure your login password is a strong password with mixed upper & lower case, digits, and special characters.
* Install a firewall program. I use the Symantec stuff for both antivirus and intrusion detection/protection.
* Update the operating system automatically since that plugs the security holes as they are uncovered.
* Give all the other accounts on your machine ( 'administrator' account and 'guest' account ) a really strong password.
* Turn off all the Microsoft file sharing if the firewall program doesn't do it automatically.

 

[Edd]

Thanks Geoff. Appreciate the advice.