Public Wi-Fi is a breeding ground for the act of wireless phishing, says Amit Sinha, CTO at Web security and monitoring vendor AirDefense. Encryption makes it almost impossible for someone to decipher that information, but for the majority of hot spots, unencrypted transactions are the norm. Make sure laptops are properly patched and use of a VPN to ensure that the information being transferred over the network is encrypted and undecipherable to potential sniffers. If you’re checking e-mail without a high layer of encryption like HTTPS or SSL, hackers have the ability to capture those wireless packets.”]
Source: https://www.csoonline.com/article/2123219/how-to-fortify-your-connection.html