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Not an Easy Target  ·  Week 42, 2026  ·  October 14, 2026

The Coffee Shop Wi-Fi May Not Belong to the Coffee Shop

A weekly newsletter by Corey White from Cythentic

When your phone joins a network called Airport Free WiFi, it has no way to know who set it up. Anyone with a cheap device can broadcast that name.

This week's door is public Wi-Fi: the airport gate, the hotel lobby, the coffee shop, the doctor's waiting room.

🎭 Why a fake network works

Most public Wi-Fi is run honestly. Some of it is not, and a fake hotspot with a convincing name looks exactly like the real one in your phone's list.

Your phone may even join it on its own, because it remembers a name it trusted once.

👀 What the network can still see

Most websites now encrypt what you type, and that helps. It does not hide everything:

🕵️Who you talk to
Which services you reach, and when.
🧭Where you go
Which sites you visit, even when the contents are scrambled.
🎣Fake sign-in pages
A hostile network can steer you toward lookalike sites that copy the real ones.
💡 You cannot audit every network you join. You can make sure none of them sees much.
🔒 Option 1: a VPN

A VPN wraps everything your device sends in an encrypted tunnel to a provider you chose. The coffee shop's network, or whoever is pretending to be it, sees scrambled traffic going to one place.

If you go this way, do it properly:

1
Choose a paid provider you have researched yourself. Look for a clear no-logging policy and independent audits. I am not naming a company, because I have not vetted any and I am not paid by any.
2
Be wary of free ones. Something has to pay for them, and some do it by collecting and selling the browsing data you installed them to protect.
3
Install it from the official app store or the provider's own site, on your phone, your laptop and any tablet you carry.
4
Turn on auto-connect, so you never have to remember it.
5
Turn on the kill switch, which blocks your internet if the VPN drops instead of letting traffic leak out.
🛡️ Option 2: no VPN, and still much safer

You do not have to pay anyone. These habits cover most of the risk:

1
Use your phone's own data for anything that matters. Banking, shopping and signing in to email are best done on cellular, or on your phone's personal hotspot, not on a network you do not control.
2
Ask the staff for the exact network name, and prefer one that needs a password. Treat near-duplicates such as the same name with a different spelling as suspect.
3
Stop your phone from joining networks on its own. Turn off auto-join, and forget the public networks it has already saved.
4
Never click through a certificate or security warning in your browser. On a hostile network that warning is often the only sign you get.
5
Turn on two-step sign-in for your email and your bank. Then a password stolen on a bad network is not enough on its own.
6
Keep your phone and laptop updated, and switch off file sharing and AirDrop-style sharing while you are out.
7
Sign out of accounts when you finish, and skip the sensitive stuff if you are not sure about the network.
⏱️ Tonight's ten minutes
Open your phone's Wi-Fi settings and forget every public network on the list. Then switch on two-step sign-in for your email. Those two steps help whether or not you ever buy a VPN.

Next time you sit down at a gate, you will pick the connection on purpose, and whoever is running that free network gets nothing worth taking.

📕 Where this comes from

This is one of the 263 doors in my book, You're Already a Target. It is on Kindle pre-order now, out November 3.

Hit reply and tell me which public network you use most. I read every reply.

This week's question

You are at the airport. Three Wi-Fi networks are named almost the same. Which one is the real airport network?

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