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Some things to do to secure your computer when using WiFi. You should do some of these anyway.

1. Run firewall software on every computer. There are some good ones that are free. If you don't know what else to do, set the definitions so that all outgoing requests are permitted, but all incoming are blocked. This way you can surf the web and read email because those are situations where you send an outgoing message and then get a response. This is safe, unless you have some viruses (or is it virii?) or Trojan horses, etc. Any attempt by a hacker to send a request in would get rejected. At home, on your private network you are probably behind a hardware firewall that is built into the DSL/cable router/hub. As long as you are behind this hardware firewall, sharing files between home computers is safe. It is when you hit the road and you are connected to the Starbucks WiFi network that will get you exposed because you do not have any control over the hardware firewall definitions (web etc.)

2. If you use VPN to connect to the office then no one else on the public network can see what you are doing, as long as the VPN connection is encrypted. One of the purposes of VPN is to create a virtual encrypted connection over a real unencrypted public network. When connecting into office you should always use some soft of VPN protocol, even over a dial-up connection. The packets of data between you and the office go through many other computers. Any of these computers could be running packet-sniffing software to capture all data to and from your computer. If it is not encrypted then anyone can see what you are doing. If all you want to do is surf the web to check out the local chamber of commerce web site to see what might be going on then there is no reason to encrypt that type of traffic. If at any time I connect to the office from any location offsite I am required by my employer to run VPN.

3. Run backups. I no longer make any attempt to backup to floppies or even to CD/DVD. Hard drives are so cheap, except in a laptop, that I just run multiple hard drives. I no longer run anything smaller than 120 gigabytes. I partition each physical drive into multiple logical drives to organize the data. Then any logical drive (aka partition) that is critical is cloned (copied) to another logical drive on the other physical drive. I can't and don't clone it all, but all of the critical stuff is cloned.

I could ramble for hours on these topics, but this is sorta the wrong forum for computer geek stuff.


hth