Quote:We might disagree, but why would you say that?  Current WiFi technology is pretty much the easiest to exploit.  That "free WiFi" wherever you are is not really safe.  I know that I personally wouldn't log in to any website or try to access anything important to me using a public WiFi connection.  If residential WiFi ever becomes a reality (at this point) it could be disastrous.

 

The easiest way to get hacked is by some phishing attack, or downloading/clicking on some infected file.  This is how most ransomware gets distributed.  That is easy. Hacking wifi is difficult.  For home wifi, you only have to do two things to protect yourself.  Set the encryption to WPA2 with a good password, and change the router's default password.  Wifi passwords can be cracked offline with a deauth attack, but the hacker would literally have to have a list of passwords that just so happens to have yours in it to crack it.  Brute forcing would likely take forever even for a bad password and probably isn't even worth it.

 

As for public wifi, I only use a handful of reputable companies (Starbucks, Target, B&N ...).  I wouldn't just randomly use any wifi hotspot.  Really, if it's not Starbucks most of the time I use my phone's hotspot.

 

When you log into hotspots like Starbucks, you are completely isolated, internet access only.  So you can't really get hacked through the network because you're not really on a network.  The only issue is that unencrypted wifi packets can be sniffed.  But most web sites default to https, meaning it's encrypted automatically before anything leaves your computer. So the data would be useless (as it's encrypted anyway). Then there's any number of things you can do like VPN to protect sensitive information.

 

The biggest issue is the man in the middle attack.  Which probably isn't even an issue for encrypted home wifi.   But as for public wifi, even though a MITM attack is extremely unlikely, yea I don't do any banking or anything like that.  I usually avoid credit card transactions too, even though the worse that could happen there is I have to get a new credit card.  

 

As for residential wi-fi.  That already is a reality.  Most people are already using wi-fi (really pretty much everyone). Not sure what you mean by that.  

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