Travel security

How to protect yourself from common hotel security threats

Hotels are digitally dangerous places these days. And that's not idle speculation. Security researchers have been sounding the alarm on sophisticated attacks directed at hotel users for years.

Most of the earliest reports pointed to surgical strikes on high-profile executives or representatives of government agencies, but they could prove to be precursors for more wide-ranging attacks on the general public. Modern business travelers, with their treasure troves of files and personal information, will be prime targets, and they're also more likely to let their guard down after an exhausting journey.

Here's a look at some of the most likely avenues of attack on hotel goers, along with some suggestions that can mitigate, if not altogether block, such attempts.

Without question, the greatest potential danger resides in the hotel network. Hackers have been known to infiltrate hotel networks to spy on traffic flowing through them or to plant malware at the captive portals users are automatically redirected to for authentication. One advanced scheme pushed malware via a software update that was designed to install on Windows PCs.