Staying safe on public Wi-Fi

Cafés, airports and hotels are convenient — and risky. On open networks, attackers on the same Wi-Fi can attempt to intercept unencrypted traffic or set up fake hotspots. You have no way to know who runs the access point you just joined, or who else is sitting on it.

What can actually go wrong

Fake hotspots (“evil twins”) are the classic attack: a laptop broadcasts a network named after the café, your phone auto-joins, and every unencrypted request you make passes through the attacker’s hands. Even on the legitimate network, anyone can see which sites you connect to via DNS, and captive portals sometimes inject their own scripts into pages.

HTTPS protects the content of most sites these days, but not the pattern: which sites, when, for how long. And plenty of apps still make some requests insecurely in the background.

The two-minute setup

Turn on your VPN before you connect to anything, and enable auto-connect on untrusted networks so you’re protected automatically. With encryption on, even a compromised network only sees scrambled data — the attacker on the evil twin gets nothing readable at all.

Two settings worth enabling in the JaguarVPN app: auto-connect on unknown Wi-Fi, and the kill switch, which blocks traffic entirely if the tunnel ever drops. Together they make the safe path the default one — you connect, the tunnel comes up, and nothing leaves your device unprotected. Set it up once on every device you carry.