The UAE’s everyday life is back to remote working. Rights to freelance, flexible desks in Business Bay, laptops open in hotels and long afternoons in the coffee shops with good air conditioning. The setup works. Perhaps what most folks never considered is that a laptop computer is very different from a cell phone. When it connects to a network it does not belong to, it also often shows up on other networks that it doesn’t belong to.
Your laptop is chattier than your phone
By design, cell phones are locked down. Laptops are not. A typical work laptop will come with the office habit in tow when it was first set up on this new network. Discovery could be enabled, searching for other machines. Even file sharing can be on from a project six months ago from which no one turned it off. Printer discovery: The printer’s name (usually the owner’s full name) is sent out. Cloud sync clients “Wake up and start pulling.” Mapped network drives attempt to reconnect.
None of this is wrong. It is a laptop that was programmed to do what it was programmed to do on a trusted and secure office network, a network that is NOT like one. The home/office network vs. a shared public network is the one distinction that the operating system is asking for when it will make your device discoverable and it’s the fastest one people click through.
Who is actually on the network with you
The truth in a co-working office and in the typical cafe is you have no idea. It’s not a cause for concern – it’s just how it works. The US Federal Communications Commission provides consumers with a primer on imposter hotspots and risk of shared networks that will not tell you who’s operating the network, which is the bad part.
The communications between your browser and the website are secured with HTTPS, so most of your sites’ web traffic is secure. This includes what is being said. No mention of sites visited and nothing for a machine on the same local network looking for open shares on yours.
Hotel Wi-Fi deserves its own paragraph
Hotel networks will have all of those cumbersome properties in a single location. The key or password is circulated around the entire building and frequently printed on a key card format. Visitors are not going to be there for minutes, but they are going to be there for days and therefore, something can be noticed. Captive portal pages require clicking on terms and may even require program installation; this inculcates a habit of clicking “yes” to terms you don’t know on a network you don’t know. For instance, if you are staying in a hotel room and need to use an internet connection in Dubai during your entire week’s stay, treat it as a public internet connection instead of the first hour.
What to change on the laptop itself
These are one-time settings and no one tool matters as much as these.
- When prompted, set the network to public (not private or trusted). Enables this, disables discovery and sharing.
- Check that the firewall is enabled and will by default reject incoming connections.
- Stop file and printer sharing unless a person is using the device or network it is attached to, and change the name of the device if it is broadcasting your full name.
- Prevent automatic network connection with public Wi-Fi networks, and disconnect from them when off.
- Allow full disk encryption. Shared office areas involve placing your laptop on a desk without supervision, or data being lost if the laptop is stolen, and encryption is where your data can help.
- Update the operating system/ web browser. For small businesses, near the top of the NIST small business cybersecurity guide lies PATCHES – for a good reason, because patching the gaps that opportunistic attacks exploit.
Encrypting the connection itself
The laptop is safeguarded by the device settings. Do not secure the outgoing traffic from it. Therefore, when you log in to your VPN service, the data that you share (via the common router) is hidden from the network operator and from all other people on that network. That is a sensible default—not an odd and extraordinary situation—that has to occur on a network that you are not controlling for which you have no visibility or control.
If you handle client work
Freelancers and consultants use other people’s information and responsibility rides with the laptop, not the office. Similarly, if you have client contracts, financial records, design and/or personal information, the standard you apply on a cafe network would not be a personal preference; it would be a duty of care to your clients. Also, it’s a simple thing to be able to explain to a client that asks. The entire setup is just a few preference settings to set once and a single click out of the application, an inexpensive way of letting the person taking the meeting know that you have no plans of trading table space for tracking.
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