Why Lawyers Should Never Use Starbucks WiFi

If you really need to use internet at a hotel or coffee shop, here are some things you can do.

Starbucks logo coffeeWe’ve all heard it: “Don’t use Starbucks/hotel/any unsecured wifi connections” because…all sorts of bad things will happen. But what happens? How does it happen? What are the chances of it happening? What can you do to protect yourself?

The Perils of Unsecured Wifi

First, imagine you are a thief and you want to break into houses. You could go door to door to look for broken locks, or you could go to a neighborhood that doesn’t believe in locks. That neighborhood is any place that uses an unsecured wifi. A thief could be anyone in the same hotel as you, anyone in the hotel’s parking lot, any other fellow author writing the great American novel at Starbucks. You don’t get any notification that anyone looked at your stuff. You will never know.

Here’s how unsecured wifi works: Information that you send and receive is delivered in chunks of information called packets. When you use unsecured wifi, those packets can be intercepted and reorganized into readable information. I’m not going to link to it here, but there are simple free apps for PC, Android, or iOS that you can use to capture and organize this information. Anything, from your login credentials to the pages you are looking at, can be intercepted and saved.

So, when you are working on a brief and you email it or upload it to Dropbox, or email a client, or download your client’s medical records or patent application, and you are on an unsecured connection, anyone who really wants to can take a peek.

UPDATE (4/12/2017, 12:20 p.m.): A diligent reader points out: “Dropbox encrypts all traffic between a computer and their servers with SSL, the same technology that’s in place when we log on to our online banks. So if I install Dropbox on my laptop, any file I put into a folder there is synced with the Dropbox servers completely encrypted. Yes, the nefarious hackers could still grab the data packets from the air, but it would be encrypted gibberish.”

How to Do Better

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If you really need to use internet at a hotel or coffee shop, here are some things you can do.

VPN

A Virtual Private Network is like a private, protected tunnel from your laptop to your office. Talk to your IT admin about setting up a VPN.

Turn Off Sharing

When you connect to a wifi network, one of the options you have is to set the sharing options. It is an option that you can set in the network settings at the time the new network connection is made. When you are in a home or work network, it might make sense to turn on sharing. That would allow other computers connected to that same wifi network to view files and folders that are set up for sharing. If you don’t know if your files or folders are set for sharing, don’t enable this setting. Never enable this setting for any public wifi.

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Other Office Network Hazards

Ethernet ports in Office

If you have ethernet ports in your office conference room, you might be leaving yourself open. You can protect your network by not giving people the wifi password, but that’s only one way to connect. Someone might be able to connect to your network by a wired connection. Those are sometimes less secure because it requires an actual piece of hardware to be plugged in, and usually into someone’s office. It’s pretty hard for a thief to sneak into someone’s office with a LAN cable and plug it in with no one noticing. But, if that port is in a conference room, when you have a court reporter plugging into a bunch of ports, what’s one more wire plugged into the wall? Depending on how your network is set up, someone connected to an ethernet port could have access to other files and other computers on the network. Make sure you do not have any wifi ports in your conference rooms and if you do, make sure you are aware that people might be able to access your files if they connect to them.

Guest wifi

When people come to your office for a depo, it’s not uncommon for them to ask for the office wifi. Most routers now days give the user the option to create two wireless networks – a network that connects the other computers and files in your office, and a guest wifi that allows users to access the internet, but nothing else that is connected to the network. If you are going to be having guests coming to your office, consider setting up a guest wifi network, but do not give guests access to your firm’s private wifi network.


Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner at the Law Office of Jeff Bennion. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of San Diego’s plaintiffs’ trial lawyers association, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego. He is also the Education Chair and Executive Committee member of the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section. He is a member of the Advisory Council and instructor at UCSD’s Litigation Technology Management program. His opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.

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