Worry a lot. Certainly, there isn’t some malicious hacker lurking in the dark corner of every coffee shop and restaurant. But how can you be sure that there isn’t somebody running Firesheep or another spyware program just when you want to send some private email or sensitive corporate data?You can never be sure. The problem is that cybercrime has turned into big business and the tools needed to lurk on your conversations wirelessly are easy to obtain. You may never get hacked or you might lose sensitive data this afternoon. Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry?
The threat of someone lurking nearby with a packet sniffer on their otherwise innocent looking laptop has made many of us a bit paranoid. You may not care who’s watching you read the news or check the weather, but do you really want to open your email or log-into personal services in that environment? You can either pay up for 3G and 4G cellular services, which are harder to crack but not impossible, just forget doing much online when you are out and about, or set up Private WiFi for your computers.
What is Private WiFi? It’s a service that creates a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for anything you send over the Internet. If you work from home, your company may have set you up with a corporate VPN so that you can securely access company data. Usually, this involves installing special VPN encryption software on your PC that only works with similar software in the corporate data center.
What’s different about Private WiFi is that it isn’t limited to any particular business or any business at all. This is a VPN that secures your Internet connection, even over public WiFi networks. The way a VPN works is that it encrypts or scrambles the data you transmit and receive while it is on the wireless link. That way it is nearly impossible to decode, and way beyond the capability of the identity thieves sipping a late in the next booth. This is why they call it a virtual private network. It virtually creates a private connection for you across a public network.
The way Private WiFi works is that you install the VPN software on your computer and it creates an encrypted tunnel for your data anytime you use the Internet. That encrypted connection is between your computer and the secure Private WiFi servers. Those servers connect to the Internet using high speed connections. Private WiFi uses industry standard 128-bit encryption, the same technology used by your bank or credit card company. Everything you do on any WiFi or other Internet connection uses this VPN to protect your data.
Private WiFi works with both PCs and Macs and costs about ten buck a month. That’s a lot cheaper than other wireless access if you already have WiFi readily available to you. There are also family plans and corporate discounts available. If you aren’t sure this is for you, why not take a free 3-day trial and see how it works? Go ahead and start your Private WiFi Free 3-day trial now and stop worrying about who’s lurking at your favorite WiFi hotspots.
