How do you stay safe on public WiFi?

Opera has a free VPN for android devices/Opera.
There are a number of VPN services, we like privateinternetaccess.com, use it on our home router for full house coverage, use it on android/mobile for coverage, as well as on the laptop when out. Many end points and great speed/service. I think it’s $40 or so a year, well worth it.
If you are just looking at mobile devices, try opera’s free vpn first, it’s nice, easy to use, and great. If you need more end points or no logs, completely private, try privateinternetaccess.com. There are other paid vpn services, but I don’t have first hand experience with them.

If you don’t mind spending a bit on security you could consider: Tiny Hardware Firewall VPN.
http://www.tinyhardwarefirewall.com/

This costs $95USD/year (and is extra hardware), but is a very good solution for protecting your internet habits.

Some of the benefits are: it connects to TOR from the firewall and the access point can be shared with other devices/friends. On the down side beginners will struggle to get the most out of this device, and VPN selection is limited.

Here is a review on it by the Twit people:
http://www.tinyhardwarefirewall.com/reviews/

Also note the nothing is completely secure. Here is an interesting article on how Carnegie Melon University was hired by the FBI to crack TOR.

We use Wi-Fi, short for wireless fidelity, everywhere and on many devices to connect to the Internet over the air instead of through a physical cable. Wi-Fi gives us more freedom and power,but not without risk.

There are several hackers and cyber criminals looking for unsecured network so that they can hack one’s personal information. So what you must do? Here find out - Top 10 Best Ways to Stay Safe on Public Wi-Fi Networks

The best way to stay safe: Linux + local Sim card.

I don’t know really, there is no way out of a public wifi! you always catch a virus or a trojan or anything that will harm your device!!!

For the last few months I’ve been using GetCloak for OSX/iOS and I freaking love it. It’s cheap, automatically enables itself when necessary, is fast and “just works” all over the world.

I use VPN (Hotspot Shield) and SSH tunnelling to my server.

Look, I’d be happy to set up a VPN service and sell you guys VPNs if I thought it would actually be helpful for most people. But most people don’t need one for most things. Here’s why:

You should be using SSL/TLS to secure your email. Do this anyway, not just when you’re traveling. Gmail does this automatically.

Online banking and any important account you have is all secured by
SSL anyway. So, as long as you’re cognizant about man in the
middle attacks and don’t ignore security warnings from your browser,
you’re OK.

Google uses SSL by default. So your searches and results are
encrypted.

Facebook uses SSL by default. So your traffic is encrypted.

Twitter uses SSL by default. So your traffic is encrypted.

If you have Google Voice, two factor authentication is easy to
implement on most services that are especially sensitive. So, you
should implement it.

If there is enough demand, I will start a service called NomadVPN for people. However, I don’t think the scenario is “protect your stuff from bad people eavesdropping on WiFi.” It’s more like “get around whatever the Thai army has decided to block this week.”

@zakerving This just came through my RSS reader today. Haven’t read through it yet, but planning to. Seems like a good guide to practical security: http://www.decentsecurity.com/

Another recommendation for Get Cloak. It’s very easy to use, which is nice.

Some people say that being paranoid about security whilst traveling is more trouble than its worth. I’ve had my identity stolen 4 times over the last two decades and right now I’m sitting in a cafe and noticed that someone here is scanning my ports in waves.

If a location has crap internet and VPN-ing is near impossible, they just don’t get my patronage and I’ll tell them politely. On the flip side, if they’ve got good internet, I’ll buy more from their menu and thank them for the speeds. On top of this, if the venue is one that encourages people to use their internet, I’ll leave a foursquare/yelp review including the internet quality.

The argument is that some countries will have internet so bad that VPNing is impossible - the likelihood of me working in those countries will be zero so the argument shouldn’t apply to most nomads.

The odds are low that you’ll get hit by a hacker whilst on the road - but when you do, its a huge hassle to sort out your life when you’re in an unfamiliar country.

In a lot of countries it’s pretty viable to purchase a sim card with generous / unlimited data for a pretty low cost. EG. In Thailand, I pay 400 baht ($13usd) for 1 month with 3GB of data (DTAC). There are higher packages and more options.

Combining this with a Portable WIFI Router, you can run your own secure WIFI network. I’m opting for the D-LINK AC750 but there are a few others you could use.

When you’re on the road, you’re going to end up using all sorts of dodgy networks in sketchy places. But, if you go the sorts of places where I often find myself, you’ll be grateful to have Internet access at all.

VPNs sound great in theory. In reality, you’ll be on some flaky WiFi connected to an even flakier ADSL line on a really slow network. Good luck getting or maintaining a connection over a VPN.

The upshot? Most of the time, there’s not actually a bogey man. If you monitor the WiFi of coffee shops frequented by tourists, you’re pretty much wasting your time as a hacker. What are you going to get, exactly? Skype chats with friends and family? Pictures of the beach? Governments tend to target local political dissidents and they use hostile DNS tricks and Web filtering to block material they don’t like (for example, you can’t read the Wikipedia article about the King of Thailand when you’re in Thailand–it’s blocked by the Army). And hackers tend to go after information that can be sold, focusing on businesses like banks. While you might wish that someone really cared that much about your startup, it’s not very likely.

I recently switched from Private Tunnel (OpenVPN’s pay as you go product) to GetCloak, both are great. i’m thrilled with GetCloak for being user friendly and just stupid easy to use. Including their whitelisting of known safe SSIDs and “overcloak” that locks out non-ssl traffic until the VPN is setup.

I’ve never found a VPN that was really GOOD to use from South Asia. GetCloak from Thailand tends to connect to Japan, but I’ve bugged them about adding an server in Singapore which I think would better, especially from Indonesia. They use AWS and Linode for their data centers and I’m pretty sure both have data centers in Singapore now.

Feel free to send GetCloak a note suggesting that they add a singapore endpoint

Cloak App for Mac is a great way to browse securely.
It works seamlessly in the background with relatively fast automatic connections.

Yup. It’s all about a VPN. I use GetCloak. Others swear by TunnelBear.

+1 to @gums’ comments regarding VPN, firewall, etc.

We aren’t currently listing more details of wifi APs on cafes4nomads.com while we focus on the info more people are looking for while we have limited resources to work on the site. Another reason is that cafes or other spots to work tend to change fairly often in many areas, so our information would likely become out of date rather quickly. Hopefully some of the features I have planned for our site will help in this area as well.

I think that if AP security is that vital for you (beyond securing your connection, system, etc), then you won’t be using cafes’ internet anyway and will likely have your own 3G/4G secured connection.

The annoying thing about nomad-friendly spots with wifi is that the majority of them are open access points. I’d rather jump on a WEP connection than a connection with no authentication whatsoever. If you were to avoid APs that were insecure, you’d knock out half of the ones Nomad use in Asia.

VPN, firewall yourself, block off ports and make sure nobody shoulder-surfs you when using passwords.

I swear by VPNs - plus as an added bonus, if you’re in a country with rubbish internet, a VPN may actually speed up the connection.

FWIW, my Chiang Mai coffee-spot list has AP security listed on it