The coffee shop password moment that hit me hard

Last week I was at a local cafe in Portland and someone asked the barista for the wifi password. The barista just pointed to a printed card on the counter that had the network name and password sitting right out in the open. My friend leaned over and said, 'That's basically a public key to everyone's device.' It made me rethink how I treat passwords at home, I still use the same one for my router that came in the box. Has anyone else realized something obvious like this after seeing it play out in front of them?

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stella_scott9612d ago

Is changing your router password really going to change anything though? Most people don't even know how to log into their router settings, let alone update the firmware. A coffee shop printed password is about convenience, not security, same as your home setup. The real risk isn't the password being visible, it's that people leave default settings wide open on smart devices and never update anything. If someone is close enough to your wifi to hack it, they could just as easily knock on your door. I get the point, but we're all choosing easy over paranoid and that's a fair trade for most.

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