Summer Festivals and Fairs Attract Hackers – Learn How to Protect Yourself
Who doesn’t like summer festivals?! California’s Coachella or UK’s Glastonbury Festival, along with many others, attract thousands of people who are hungry for good music, great drinks, and crazy fun. But there’s one problem, no one cares to remember cyber security during these events.
Well, why would they? People come to summer festivals and fairs to have a good time and forget about their worries – which makes these events the perfect opportunity for hackers to get their hands on people’s personal information.
Summer Festivals and Cyber Security Threats
If we remember the infamous security attack on Tomorrowland that led to 64,000 ticket buyers’ info being hacked or over 1 million hacking incidents that happened during Coachella, there’s no doubt that hackers are taking advantage of these events as much as they can.
There are a couple of different cybersecurity threats that are closely tied to summer festivals and music events. One of the most common types of attacks is the festival and ticketing website attack, where hackers create duplicate sites to scam people into submitting their information.
They are so skilled at creating fake websites that it’s often tough to tell whether the site you’re on is fraudulent or not. In most cases, these fake sites offer cheaper tickets and free merch, which attracts many festival goers who are quick to swipe their credit cards virtually.
Hence, hackers can easily collect personal information, including passwords and financial data. However, that’s not the only way for them to get their hands on people’s info. If you like going to summer festivals, you might’ve noticed lots of free Wi-Fi networks around these events.
That’s not a coincidence. Hackers often take advantage of free, unprotected Wi-Fi networks to lurk on people’s devices and gain access to all sorts of data. They even go out of their way to create fake hotspots that can give them a backdoor into people’s smartphones.
The larger music festivals often pay telecom companies to set up site-wide Wi-Fi networks, which are advertised as safer than random open hotspots. However, even these networks are susceptible to cyberattacks because thousands of people are trying to connect to them at once, thus overwhelming the bandwidth.
How to Keep Your Data Safe During Summer Festivals
Unless you’re buying tickets on the official site and bringing your own router, you may be in severe cyber danger while attending summer festivals and dance events. Luckily, there are ways to secure your data on the go and reduce the odds of becoming a cybersecurity statistic.
For instance, start by carefully choosing the website where you plan to purchase the tickets. It is best to use the official ticketing website to avoid security threats, although these sites aren’t bulletproof either. Still, avoiding third-party online resellers is a much safer way to go.
For the best security, download a virtual private network or VPN to hide your online activity. The way VPN works are simple – it allows you to virtually change your location and connect to a private and encrypted server which makes you appear private online.
That means hackers won’t be able to spot you on the free Wi-Fi network or any of the hotspots in the area. It’s like an invisibility shield that encrypts your data and online traffic for maximum security.
You can easily get a free VPN by signing up for a free trial on any leading VPN service website. Naturally, you can choose a subscription plan that best suits your needs after the free trial.
However, we would not recommend using an entirely free virtual private network for pretty obvious reasons – even free things come with a cost one way or another. In this case, many free VPN services monetize their offer through aggressive advertising or the less legal – selling users’ data on the black market.
So, unless you want your info to end up on a random site on the dark web, we recommend sticking to reputable VPN services. Most of them offer a free trial anyway, so if you need the best VPN for iPhone to attend a music festival, you can most likely get the security benefits for free.
Either way, next time you start looking for a music festival ticket, be prepared for potential security risks that may come your way. While you’re at it, raise awareness and help others secure their data.