Travelers Are the Easiest Targets Online – Here’s the One Habit That Actually Helps

I have been living out of a bag for a long time now, and in that time I have made most of the rookie mistakes at least once. I have booked the wrong dates, missed a bus by thirty seconds, and ended up sleeping in an airport because I was too stubborn to pay for a nearby hotel.

What I have never done – or at least not knowingly – is get hacked. But the more I read about what actually happens to travelers on public Wi-Fi, the more I realise how much of that is luck rather than good judgment.

Most of us approach the internet on the road the same way we approach the local tap water: vaguely aware there might be a risk, but connecting anyway because the alternative is inconvenient. And honestly, that’s fine most of the time.

But there’s one low-effort habit that I genuinely wish I’d adopted earlier, and it costs almost nothing to put in place before you leave home.

The Actual Problem With Wi-Fi on the Road

It’s easy to assume that the Wi-Fi risk is overblown – something tech people worry about more than it’s worth. But a 2025 survey by Panda Security found that 36% of Americans at least suspected they’d had a security incident after using public Wi-Fi, and 19% were certain they had. That’s not a theoretical risk. That’s a substantial chunk of people who paid for it in some form.

The reason travelers are particularly exposed is straightforward: You are using unfamiliar networks, often in a hurry, on devices that are logged into everything – your email, your bank, your accommodation bookings, your airline account. You are connecting from airports, hotel lobbies, beach cafés, and co-working spaces, and you have no way of knowing whether the network you’re joining is what it claims to be.

The ‘evil twin’ attack is worth understanding, because it’s both common and easy to pull off. A bad actor sets up a Wi-Fi hotspot with a name that looks identical – or very close – to the legitimate one. You connect without thinking, and they can see everything passing through your unencrypted connection including login pages, session data, and anything that isn’t protected end-to-end. You’d never know it happened.

Why Browser-Level Protection Makes Sense For Travelers

There’s a lot of travel security advice out there, and a lot of it is too cumbersome to actually follow consistently. Use a separate SIM card in every country. Never connect to Wi-Fi at all. Use a dedicated travel device. It’s all technically sound, but almost none of it reflects how people actually travel.

What does work, and what I’ve started doing, is handling the browser layer specifically, because that’s where almost all the sensitive activity happens.

Checking in for a flight, booking an extension on an Airbnb, logging into your banking app via Chrome, looking up whether your travel insurance covers that activity you’re about to try. All of it goes through the browser, and all of it is exposed if the underlying connection isn’t secure.

Adding a CyberGhost VPN for Chrome means that traffic passing through your browser is encrypted, and your actual IP address is masked from whatever network you’re sitting on. It doesn’t require you to change how you use the internet – you install it once, toggle it on when you’re connected to something you don’t fully trust, and get on with your day.

For a traveler who is perpetually bouncing between hotel networks and café hotspots, that’s about as close to a frictionless solution as you’ll find.

What You’re Actually Protecting

The thing most people don’t think about is that a hack doesn’t have to be dramatic to be damaging. You don’t need to lose your entire bank account for it to ruin a trip.

Someone gaining access to your email is enough to intercept a booking confirmation and change the details. A compromised airline login can get you bumped off a flight. A stolen session cookie from a travel platform can let someone else make changes to a reservation you were relying on.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded a 47% increase in public Wi-Fi-related cyberattacks in 2024, with hotel networks being the third most targeted venue after airports and coffee shops. If you want a more grounded look at how these threats actually play out in practice, the FBI’s online safety resources for travellers are worth fifteen minutes of your time before any international trip.

None of this means you should spend your holiday in a state of digital paranoia. Sensible precautions and a browser extension you barely have to think about are enough to close most of the gap between how exposed you are and how exposed you need to be.

Building the Habit Before You Leave Home

The best time to set this up is before you go, when you’re not jet-lagged and in a rush to find accommodation. Here’s what the pre-departure checklist looks like:

• Turn on two-factor authentication for your email, banking, and any booking platforms you use regularly. This is the single highest-impact step and takes about ten minutes.
• Make sure your browser is updated. Outdated browsers have documented vulnerabilities that make everything else harder.
• Install a reputable browser extension that handles encryption at the browser level — the kind that you can activate with one click whenever you’re on an unfamiliar network. Look for one with a clear no-logs policy and a transparent privacy track record. The Chrome Web Store’s extensions page is the safest place to browse options, since extensions from third-party sites bypass the store’s vetting process entirely.
• Write down — actually write down, on paper — your most important account credentials and keep them in a separate bag from your devices. Old-fashioned, but it works.

The Bigger Picture

Long-term travel teaches you to pack lighter and think more carefully about what you actually need versus what you’ve just gotten used to carrying. Digital security is the same. Most of what people do to protect themselves online is either too heavy (dedicated devices, separate logins for every country) or too light (just hoping nothing bad happens).

The browser layer sits right in the middle — lightweight enough that it doesn’t slow you down, effective enough that it closes the most common gaps. If you’re putting together your packing list, add it. It takes up no space in your bag.

For more on practical slow travel tips and habits worth building before you hit the road, my travel tips section has plenty to keep you busy.

Travel is unpredictable enough without handing someone an easy way in. Take the ten minutes. You’ll forget it’s there, right up until the moment you’re glad it was.