For this scenario, are you imagining that a person may have physically entered the coffee shop who’s both tech savvy and malicious enough to run a malicious device there?
Or were you thinking a remote compromise of their router? That one seems moderately more probable, but eliminates anything special about the coffee shop’s router specifically as opposed to your home router or your workplace’s router.
For this scenario, are you imagining that a person may have physically entered the coffee shop who’s both tech savvy and malicious enough to run a malicious device there?
I mean… Yeah. I’ve sat in a coffee shop or airport in the past and sniffed traffic out of mere curiosity. Why wouldn’t a malicious actor be there?
I have done, and friends of mine have done a lot more than that. My point is that I’m unusually nerdy and the number of people who’ve ever been subjected to it by me being near them is probably in the double digits for a few minutes over my entire life.
I will bet you any amount of money that you can go to any coffee shop and set up an insecure VPN there all day and not a single person will randomly come in, set up a malicious DHCP server, and reroute the VPN traffic through their hardware so they can spoof it and spy on your traffic.
The fact that it’s possible means it’s worth defending against, sure. If it sounds like I’m saying it’s not a big deal I am not. I’m just saying that it is not the most common threat that you need to defend against most urgently or even in the top 10 (primarily because it requires one of this little handful of people nearby to you to be a malicious actor, where most of the ones that are really commonly-encountered threats are the ones that literally any one of billions of people on the planet could at any time randomly target you with, so you’re going to run into a lot more frequently.)
I can enumerate the ISPs that have will-hand-your-traffic-over-for-general-vacuuming-up deals with the American government, and the ISPs worldwide that do some form of traffic editing on behalf of differently-repressive-than-the-US regimes, and I can go to Starbucks tomorrow and we can compare that proportion of ISPs to the proportion of people I find actively tampering with my traffic from the cafe.
You need to compare “everybody who has ever done anything malicious at a cafe” if you want to make a valid comparison to “all the ISPs in the world”. In the US nobody would be using an ISP that would be doing anything malicious in a cafe. “has deals with the American government” paranoia notwithstanding.
That’s like 90% of the reason to actually use a VPN at a coffee shop.
For this scenario, are you imagining that a person may have physically entered the coffee shop who’s both tech savvy and malicious enough to run a malicious device there?
Or were you thinking a remote compromise of their router? That one seems moderately more probable, but eliminates anything special about the coffee shop’s router specifically as opposed to your home router or your workplace’s router.
I mean… Yeah. I’ve sat in a coffee shop or airport in the past and sniffed traffic out of mere curiosity. Why wouldn’t a malicious actor be there?
I have done, and friends of mine have done a lot more than that. My point is that I’m unusually nerdy and the number of people who’ve ever been subjected to it by me being near them is probably in the double digits for a few minutes over my entire life.
I will bet you any amount of money that you can go to any coffee shop and set up an insecure VPN there all day and not a single person will randomly come in, set up a malicious DHCP server, and reroute the VPN traffic through their hardware so they can spoof it and spy on your traffic.
The fact that it’s possible means it’s worth defending against, sure. If it sounds like I’m saying it’s not a big deal I am not. I’m just saying that it is not the most common threat that you need to defend against most urgently or even in the top 10 (primarily because it requires one of this little handful of people nearby to you to be a malicious actor, where most of the ones that are really commonly-encountered threats are the ones that literally any one of billions of people on the planet could at any time randomly target you with, so you’re going to run into a lot more frequently.)
Sorry - but you think
I’d take that bet.
Okay, how much?
I can enumerate the ISPs that have will-hand-your-traffic-over-for-general-vacuuming-up deals with the American government, and the ISPs worldwide that do some form of traffic editing on behalf of differently-repressive-than-the-US regimes, and I can go to Starbucks tomorrow and we can compare that proportion of ISPs to the proportion of people I find actively tampering with my traffic from the cafe.
You need to compare “everybody who has ever done anything malicious at a cafe” if you want to make a valid comparison to “all the ISPs in the world”. In the US nobody would be using an ISP that would be doing anything malicious in a cafe. “has deals with the American government” paranoia notwithstanding.