It’s day two of the holiday. You’re at the pool, and your phone buzzes: a supplier needs an invoice approved before close of play. This will only take a minute, so you join the hotel Wi-Fi, open the banking app, and it’s sorted in ninety seconds.
Perfectly reasonable. But using your phone abroad has become so routine that most business owners stop thinking about security and just assume that everything will be working the same as in the UK.
How risky is public Wi-Fi, really?
Less risky than it was ten years ago, and it’s only fair to say so. Almost every website and app now uses HTTPS, which means the traffic between your phone and the far end is already encrypted. Those dramatic “hacker in the café reads your emails” demonstrations don’t work the way they once did.
What hasn’t gone away is the fake network. Someone sets up a hotspot called “Hotel_Guest_Free”, you join it without a second thought, and now they can see which services you’re talking to and, in some cases, nudge you towards a very convincing fake login page. Add in phones that haven’t been updated since March, dodgy sign-in portals, and the chap behind you with an excellent view of your screen, and there’s still plenty worth guarding against.
Is it any different from public Wi-Fi in the UK?
Technically, no. Wi-Fi in Málaga works exactly the same way as Wi-Fi in Chandler’s Ford. The difference isn’t the technology. It’s you.
At home you’re picky. Abroad, you’re jet-lagged, roaming charges are looming, and “FREE_WIFI_FAST” starts to look genuinely appealing. You’ve no idea which network names are legitimate, because you’ve never set foot in this airport before. And you’re relaxed, which is rather the point of being away, but relaxed is also the state in which people tap “connect” on things they really shouldn’t.
There’s a second difference worth knowing. Data protection rules vary enormously once you’re outside the UK and EU. If something does go wrong on a network in a country with looser rules, your options afterwards are considerably thinner.
So what is a VPN?
Villa, Pool, Nap. Sadly not.
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, and it’s simpler than the name suggests. Normally your phone’s traffic travels the open road, where anyone sharing the network can at least see where you’re going. A VPN builds a private tunnel from your phone to a server somewhere else and sends everything through it instead. The café, the hotel, the airport then all they see is a tunnel. No idea what’s inside it, no idea where it’s going.
It won’t make you invincible. It won’t save you if you type your password into a fake website. But when you’re using your phone abroad on networks you can’t vouch for, it’s a sensible layer to have switched on.
When the whole family is using your phone abroad
Which brings us to everyone else on the trip. You might be disciplined about all this. The children are not.
Hand a ten-year-old a phone and a “Free Wi-Fi” prompt and they will accept every term and condition ever written in order to get back on YouTube. Teenagers will join whatever network gives the strongest signal by the pool. And most family phones are logged into something that matters — your Apple or Google account, years of photos, and quite often a saved card.
None of this needs a stern lecture at the departure gate. It needs a two-minute chat: don’t join a network unless a grown-up says so, and if a sign-in page asks for an email password or card details just to get online, it’s fake. Real hotel Wi-Fi asks for a room number, not your bank card.
Five tips for using your phone abroad
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- Use mobile data for anything that matters. Banking, payroll, anything with money attached — do it over 4G/5G or your own personal hotspot rather than the hotel network. Check your roaming allowance before you fly and you won’t be tempted.
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- Turn off auto-join. Your phone will happily reconnect to any network it half-recognises, including one that’s simply borrowed a familiar name. Switch off automatic joining and choose each time deliberately.
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- Update everything before you travel. Phones, tablets, apps, the lot. The overwhelming majority of attacks rely on a flaw that was patched months ago.
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- Switch a VPN on and leave it on. Particularly on airport, café and hotel Wi-Fi. Connect the VPN first, then start browsing, not the other way round.
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- Turn on two-factor authentication. If a password does slip out, this is the thing standing between an irritating afternoon and a genuinely expensive one.
Before you pack
Using your phone abroad is mostly common sense. The trouble starts when it isn’t only your phone. If your staff travel with company email and files on their own devices, someone needs to have decided what happens when one of those phones is lost, stolen, or logged into the wrong network. Far better to sort that out before anyone flies than after.
Have a chat with Martin and the team at Absolute Technology. We’re based in Chandler’s Ford, we speak plain English rather than jargon, and we’d far rather help you set things up sensibly now than untangle something unpleasant when you land.
Call 0345 225 1047 (local rate), email [email protected], or visit absolute-tech.co.uk.worki
