If you’ve been to Cochella, or any other music festival, you know that sometimes finding a WiFi connection can almost be as important as finding a bathroom!
Whether it’s because you want to facetime someone to save data, or because you’ve ran out of data, or for one of the many other reasons you’d need WiFi at a music festival. But while finding WiFi at music festivals can easy, you need to remember that it’s not always secure to use unlimited WiFi.
In this guide we will help you connect to wireless hotspots the safe way! It doesn’t matter if you’re at a Coachella, Bonnaroo, Tomorrowland, Outside Lands, or one of the many other festivals.
These tips to securing your WiFi connection will help you regardless of your location. Since there are so many different types of people at these festivals, you need to make sure your personal photos, social media accounts, or phone information stays private and secure!
Do Music Festivals have Secure WiFi?
Oftentimes music festivals have free WiFi for people to connect to. Or maybe you are going into a booth to connect to Wifi and a charger. However, while these hotspots can be convenient, there are a few reasons why you should be careful.
- Decoy / Rogue WiFi Connections
You need to make sure that your WiFi connection you are connecting to is actually a stable connection. Think about it for a second. If you go to say, “Mcdonalds”, and you see “McDonaldsWiFi” how do you know that’s not just some random dude’s WiFi connection. Sometimes these locations like Music Festivals have names that aren’t as obvious, and it’s easy to trick people into connecting to the wrong WiFi connection.
If you do manage to connect to someone’s personal WiFi connection instead of an official one (not that these are super safe either), you could be in some serious trouble. If you do connect to a free WiFi access point from someone with malicious goals of stealing your passwords, usernames, or bank information, they can do so easily since they control the WiFi hotspot and can access your information. An example of a rogue access point could be “Free Outside Lands WiFi”. If you connect to this, you could lose A LOT of personal and identifying information.
- WiFi Connect Seekers
If you manage to connect to a public legit WiFi access point at a music festival, that doesn’t mean you’re safe. The reason is that it’s actually pretty easy for a hacker type to set up a router that attracts users. When a hacker sets up their own router, they can monitor ever keystroke you input, which means all of your passwords are as good as gone. Emails, private messages, and every piece of data is also game.
Free WiFI at What Cost?
Even if you do manage to find a public WiFi hotspot that is official you could be giving away a ton of information to the company providing the WiFi. Fancy giving away your email, gender, or information on how you used their WiFi. These companies can use free WiFi to gather details about the way you use internet and sell it off to other companies. Doesn’t sound so free does it
4 Steps on How to Secure WiFi Connection at Music Festival
Step #1 The best way to secure your free WiFi at a music festival is to use a VPN. VPN stands for virtual private network. Basically, you connect to a secure remote server that gives you a different identifier (IP address) and encrypts your traffic so no one can steal your information. You can use VPN on computers, phones, tablets, or even on game consoles (through a VPN router).
Step #2 Which VPN should you use? We recommend TorGuard VPN since it’s the best VPN we’ve rated. See why in our TorGuard VPN Review.
Step #3 Once you get your TorGuard subscription set up you need to pick an ideal server location (I know, you have to pay, but it’s only around $5 a month if you pick the year package). Most free VPNs barely give you any data to work with, and you’ll be capped in a day). If you’re in California, pick a CA server, or if you’re at another music festival, pick a server closeby to get the best speeds with your WiFi.
Step #4 Once you connect to a server your WiFi experience is now secure and encrypted which means no snoopers can steal your data!
