Public Wi-Fi has held a bad reputation for a long time, being a hotbed of potential cyber attacks. From network sniffing to malicious networks pretending to be public Wi-Fi hotspots, they've always been a pretty easy target for those with malicious intentions. However, public Wi-Fi is nowhere near as scary as it once was, and there are a few reasons for that.

5 Most websites use HTTPS by default these days

Your browser will even warn you when it isn't

Have you ever visited a website in your browser and it told you that your connection to the site wasn't secure or wasn't private? That's because the site used HTTP, a plaintext protocol that nowadays, is incredibly outdated. Pretty much every website out there uses HTTPS, which is an encrypted form of HTTP and means that your data, to outsiders, looks scrambled.

In the past, someone could eavesdrop on your connection and see the data the server was sending you and what you were sending in response, but that was a long, long time ago. That isn't really possible nowadays, and is the biggest protection mechanism that already made public Wi-Fi way safer.

4 Your devices have built-in protections

It's even less likely for you to leak information these days

Pretty much every modern operating system has built in protections that kick in when you're connected to Wi-Fi, meaning that they're adding an additional layer of security on public Wi-Fi connections. These are features like private DNS, which turns on DNS over TLS so even what websites you're trying to visit will be encrypted. Typically, even if a site uses HTTPS, someone on the same network could see what websites you're visiting as the DNS requests were in plaintext, but private DNS hides that.

As well, your apps are automatically encrypted nowadays in the back-end most of the time for even the most innocuous of requests.

3 VPNs are easy to use and affordable

They'll encrypt everything for you

If you're still worried about the network that you're using, you can use a VPN to encrypt all of the traffic from your device. While VPNs have some questionable marketing at times, it's undeniable that they encrypt all of your data and technically make public Wi-Fi safer. Everything you do online will go through the VPN, meaning that everything is encrypted and impossible to decipher for an attacker.

On networks that are already encrypted, a VPN won't do you much good, but a public Wi-Fi connection without any kind of security will benefit from you using a VPN. It depends on the network that you're using on whether a VPN will help or not, but technically speaking, it is an extra level of security if you're using an open WI-Fi connection.

2 Public Wi-Fi connections with passwords are completely fine to use

They feature built-in encryption

If you're using a public Wi-Fi connection that's secured with WPA2 or WPA3, then you can assume everything on the network is encrypted. In some situations, a WPA2 network may be vulnerable to KRACK which allows an attacker to view the traffic on the network, but for the most part, devices have been patched since then. Plus, WPA3 has no such vulnerability known at present.

What a network secured with WPA2 or WPA3 will do is encrypt all of the data between the router and devices that are connected to it, so even your HTTP websites will still be encrypted and hidden from prying eyes. This is as safe as it gets when it comes to public Wi-Fi, and you can double up with features like private DNS to use the network completely worry free.

1 Public Wi-Fi attacks are less common today

They're not really profitable

Public Wi-Fi attacks haven't really ever been common, but nowadays, even less so. How would they be profitable? What purpose would it serve? There isn't much really to gain from attacking a public Wi-Fi network, and a would-be hacker would more likely better spend their time on other actions than trying to sniff the traffic of other users on a Starbucks Wi-Fi.

Plus, from a risk assessment point of view, public Wi-Fi isn't the end all and be all. If you were to question whether the network you're using is using up-to-date hardware, ask yourself if you worry to the same level about other aspects of your life, too. If you use a VPN, do you know if their servers are upgraded? Are you fully up to date on security patches?

Public Wi-Fi connections are much, much safer than they used to be, and it's a mixture of security improvements and waning interest that have brought us to this point.