Andrea Bocelli’s “Time to Say Goodbye” filled the air. I was immediately overtaken by the sound. We laughed together as we pushed open the doors to Las Vegas Boulevard. My husband and I had just finished dining and gaming in the Paris casino, one late April night in Las Vegas. Those have been tried and true, unfortunately,” she said.By: Jennifer Evans / in Closing the Gap, Guest Columnist, Woman “Sending people nefarious emails, it’s much easier to do that kind of campaign.
Hackers “would likely do a phishing attack on you before they would walk into a cafe with free Wi-Fi,” Hancock said. Users now need to worry far less about being hacked by a fellow coffee shop patron than by a hacker simply sending an email from anywhere around the world to trick them into giving up their passwords and other sensitive information, she said. It’s kind of one of those background wins,” said Alexis Hancock, who oversees the HTTPS project as the foundation’s director of engineering. Since late 2020, major browsers such as Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge all built HTTPS into their programs, making Electronic Frontier Foundation’s browser extension no longer necessary for most people. More and more websites started offering HTTPS connections, and now practically all sites that Google links to do so. In 2015, Google started prioritizing websites that enabled HTTPS in its search results. In 2010, cybersecurity activists at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an internet freedom advocacy group, launched a project to encrypt as much web traffic as possible by developing browser extensions to let users toggle HTTPS and giving websites free tools to enable it.Īs more and more people started using HTTPS wherever possible, some of the companies that help most people use the internet got on board.
The fix is largely thanks to activists who have pushed for more than a decade for a safer way to browse the internet. And many can make things worse, either by selling customers’ browsing history to data brokers, or by having poor cybersecurity. A Consumer Reports investigation published earlier this month found that 12 of the 16 biggest VPNs make hyperbolic claims or mislead customers about their security benefits. Most VPNs market their products as a security tool. And they’re a popular and effective way to watch television shows and movies that are restricted to particular countries on streaming services.īut like with antivirus software, the paid VPN industry is a booming global market despite its core mission no longer being necessary for many people.
VPNs are also vital for businesses that need their employees to log in remotely to their internal network. They’re an invaluable tool for getting around certain types of censorship, though other options also exist, such as the Tor Browser, a free web browser that automatically reroutes users’ traffic and is widely praised by cybersecurity experts. And those are all irrelevant now with most sites using HTTPS,” he said in a text message. “I don’t know of them ever being used outside of pranks. “Remember, someone attacking you at the coffee shop needs to be basically AT the coffee shop,” he said.
It’s not clear that the threat of a hacker at your coffee shop was ever that real to begin with, but it is certainly not a major danger now, Weaver said. Indicated by a tiny padlock by the URL, the presence of HTTPS means that worrisome scenario, in which a scammer or a hacker squats on a public Wi-Fi connection in order to watch people’s internet habits, isn’t feasible. Most browsers have quietly implemented an added layer of security in recent years that automatically encrypts internet traffic at most sites with a technology called HTTPS. That can slow browsing speed, but provides the benefit of hiding a user’s Internet Protocol address - which includes their general location - from the websites they visit.īut that’s no longer the problem it once was. VPNs reroute a user’s internet traffic through their own servers. VPNs offered a way to counter that problem. If someone decided to check their bank balance, for example, they ran the risk of a nearby hacker being able to steal sensitive information. Someone sharing a Wi-Fi network with strangers was essentially sharing all their traffic with others who were using it. For years, experts warned it was dangerous for average people to use the Wi-Fi at a public place like a coffee shop without taking steps to obscure their internet traffic.