Topic: How to stay safe when browsing on hotspots or public wifi - page 3. (Read 650 times)

I second this. Usually I see antivirus software as a clog to my finely-working system, and I could live without them knowing that I only use my computer to just browse this forum and do some work-related stuff. The other aspects of my internet life I use a different machine for that, especially for gaming, downloading things and streaming movies online. In no way would I ever install Kaspersky or any other antivirus on my PC since Windows Defender had been pretty much a good company for my machine for the past 3 years.

You give me great tips to secure my life when connect to Internet. By the way, I would like to ask you and others that how to secure and stay safely from animated images? I read somewhere else that such animated images have higher security risks on static images. Does it right? If yes, how to stay safe from animated images when my friend send them to me?

I really don't recommend people to connect in public wifi or hotspots that are not trusted. Since, I saw a video on youtube that every transaction people made on that while connected can be viewed by the person with authority. For example, somebody moved his money to his savings account. As much as possible don't connect to public wifi or hotspots. Scammers are everywhere. And what if you are connected to a person that is an IT or a computer engineer and hacks you.

Binance has a good article on this: https://www.binance.vision/security/why-public-wifi-is-insecure

Some of the recommendations they listed:

I could be wrong, but I don't think your DNS actually matters if you're using a VPN service with built-in DNS leak protection, since you'll always be using the VPN-provided DNS.

I'm still very iffy about suggesting Kaspersky (or any other third party antivirus for that matter) because common sense + Windows Defender should be enough to protect you in normal day-to-day activities. To each his own though.

So you wouldn’t trust a random wi-fi, but you would trust just any old malicious VPN you happened to find on ‘underground forums’. That’s bad advice.

Only connect to wi-fi networks you have reason to trust. I avoid open ones, but I often use password-protected networks operated by some bona fide entity.

Similarly, if you decide to use a VPN, make sure it’s trustworthy. After all, whoever controls the VPN will be able to read and change all your plain-text traffic. Even when you’re using encrypted applications, the VPN owner will know where you connect and how much information you send and receive.

F-Secure Freedome is a widely used VPN with good reputation, but of course past performance doesn’t predict future results. With huge userbases comes huge responsibility, and as we’ve seen with Facebook and others, sometimes the temptation can grow too big. Remember those are all companies that seek to make a profit. ‘If you’re not the paying customer, you’re the product.’

I don't recommend a public DNS from google because I heard that google monitor's your activity through Google DNS.
You can try comodo DNS if you want to protect your self from phishing websites.

DNS SERVER of COMODO:8.26.56.26
DNS SERVER of COMODO:8.20.247.20

I got this DNS from here https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/how-to-automatically-block-phishing-sites-and-any-unwanted-web-attack-3395101 you can use google translator if you want to follow his guide.

And I think you can protect your browsing activity from public wifi if you use some 3rd party apps or software to encrypt your internet like using a VPN(recommended one is IPvanish) and antivirus(Kaspersky is recommended. Just make sure for android user's you are not rooted because I already tested that if you are rooted with antivirus it can't prevent some viruses/apps to modify your system files.

Hi there, Kristinn Spence here with a new short tutorial for you guys

How to stay safer when using hotspots or public wifi that other people have access to as well
because now a day attacks such as arp poisoning and others are pretty common and as well as honey pot attacks that hackers utilize
to steal cryptocurrencies from people and also of course standard viruses and trojans.

But how to make yourself pretty much immune to Man-In-The-Middle MITM attacks and ARP poisoning and Honeypots
is basically best to run through a VPN and change your DNS servers for basic protection

Now a VPN is a virtual private network that routes all your internet traffic through a secure server out in the world so that all your traffic is handled by that server before you even go to a website or do anything on the internet it goes directly to that server before anything else.

But of course it will not 100% make you safe but it will increase the safety a lot and decrease the chances that you will be hacked.
you can get any VPN server on the internet like express VPN, tunnelbear, hotspot shield or others a simple google search will do the trick or you can find cheap ones on underground forums.

then after you do that right click on your connection and you are going to change your dns servers so that your ISP is not handling your DNS
also sometimes your internet connection becomes faster
here are details on how to change it
https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using

now, these are fairly simple and the most basic protection measures that you can take for your internet connection and I highly recommend doing at least this to protect your traffic because apart from this hackers can sniff your internet as well using tools like Wireshark and others but it is impossible to sniff encrypted traffic.