People tend to take their laptop when they travel in order to keep in touch using free Internet over Wi-Fi.

Great, right?

It depends. Convenience is nice but you should start getting a little paranoid about your computer’s security.

Using unsecured Internet

Many sites, including social networking sites and online banking webpages, can be vulnerable to Cross Site Request Forgery (CRSF) attacks. This means if you have an active session open in one of the tabs of your browser and you open a site that has CRSF scripts, these scripts will compromise your browser’s security. They can work on your active session and do whatever they wish. When looking at information-sensitive sites, avoid opening other tabs until you finish and log out.

Sounds crazy, but this happens all the time on the Internet.

Checking personal accounts

People may not aware of it, but when you click on direct links to your personal account’s pages, you tend to use ‘http://mail.example.com’. The catch here is using “http.” To be on the safer side, we should always login using “https” instead. Simply put, HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. When you add the prefix HTTPS instead, the browser recognizes the information as sensitive, therefore making the page secure (which is what the “S” stands for).

Browser’s auto-fill and information remembering software

Many people save their passwords in the browser. There is a situation where if you are in a free Wi-Fi zone and your computer gets hacked, the first thing the hacker would do is would grab all your saved passwords. To avoid this, always have your Internet IPS/IDS updated. You can check your anti-virus program to see if your IPS/IDS is updated. Don’t open sites with security you doubt while you have your personal session active in the same browser.

Public computers

If you use a public computer, try not log on to any personal accounts. The computer might have a virus or other tools for logging whatever information you type.

Last but not least, be alert and be secure.