PSA: That "free" public wifi at the coffee shop on Elm Street is not safe even with a VPN
Last month I was at Brew House on Elm Street working on client schedules. Used their guest network with my VPN running. Three days later my bank flagged a login attempt from a different state. Talked to a guy I know who does network security. He said VPNs don't protect against everything on open wifi - if the router itself is compromised, your traffic gets grabbed before it even hits the tunnel. Anyone else had weird access attempts after using public networks?
re: "if the router itself is compromised" - my buddy had this exact thing happen at a library. used their wifi for like 10 minutes to check email, woke up to two factor alerts on his discord and steam accounts.
Did you catch that article someone posted about DNS hijacking through public wifi? Sounds like that's exactly what happened to him, the router probably redirected him to a fake login page without him even noticing.