What am idiot I've been - lesson learnt to never use open hospital WiFi again.

[Littlebluebunny]

The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a shit show.

I help care for my elderly mum who is suffering from advanced Alzheimer's. She appeared unwell on 31st January and ended up in A&E. Twenty six hours spent in a corridor saw her eventually admitted on a ward, on the Sunday night. That night my dad came down with D&V which we thought may have been stress/food poisoning. Obviously he kept away from the hospital. Sister came home from a weekend away and visited him only for her to come down with it 24 hours later. It must have been something like norovirus as they were both quite poorly with it. So visiting and advocating for mum was left to me and it turned out to be a rotten 10 days as poor mum who is non verbal and struggles to feed herself at times ended up on a drip due to dehydration which was due to the fact no one was helping her to drink whilst I was not there so I had to be there as much as possible.

It was never established quite what was wrong with mum (infection of unknown origin) so I pushed to get her discharge asap and thankfully got her home middled of last week.

Thought that was that until Barclays have contacted me today. Seems some fucker has been trying to purchase endless Just Eat orders from my account totalling £500+ and I've just noticed a £50 Just Eat voucher has been attempted to have been purchased from my JD Williams account FFS!

Barclays believes it's because I'd used the hospitals open wi-fi. What an idiot I've been. I thought I'd use it to save on my data whilst I was wiling away the hours on the ward whilst mum sleep.

I'm now spending time going through all my online accounts and changing password etc. FML.

I hope it wasn't as I'm put off trying again. Hopefully it was one of those things.

It really does put you off, doesn't it. There was I thinking it would save my precious data. That must have been so annoying for you. What a horrible world we live in sometimes.

That's exactly why I was on the internet, I was so stressed and needed to converse with dementia carers on the FB groups I am on and just some every day scrolling.

Not that I recall.

I did it in a care home for weeks.

Everyone's got a story. Everyone's been through stuff.

There is overwhelming evidence that reliance on being online is harmful.

If you don't think so, crack on.

If you have a negative consequence because of something that you didn't have to do It's not bad to point out out you didn't have to do it.

That's all my point was.

We should all be thinking about it so we have an alternative when it isn't available or proactively get one.

This is important stuff.

Do you mean affecting? What an insensitive and offensive set of posts. There are many reasons someone visiting a relative in hospital for many hours might be using their phone and wifi is often needed as you can be deep inside a building with poor phone/data signal. Keeping relatives updated, keeping up with emails, googling treatments, looking at traffic info for the journey home, just doing a bit of life admin, reading the news. The OP is entitled to do any of these or just scroll on tiktok if that's what's needed in a worrying time.

Sorry this has happened to you @Littlebluebunny and thank you for posting, I am spending a lot of time visiting a relative in hospital too lately and it can be hard. I have recently installed a VPN on my phone for this reason.

This sounds dubious to me. Unless you logged into your bank account or bought something online while on the WiFi, there isn’t really a way to get past your banks security measures just by being on the same network. If there are I’d say that’s a problem with the bank’s security measures… of course they’ll always put it back on you if they can.

Much more likely that your account details were pawned from some other online payment.

Jeez, you really are the epitome of the word obtuse aren't you?

Are you actually reading and taking in any of my responses as to why I was online at the time?

I really don't recall logging into my bank account, I do hope it wasn't the hospital's public wifi.

Thank you. I think I may need to do the same, mum has been admitted to hospital several times during the last year so we are probably looking at frequent visits or stays from now on.

What an unpleasant and unkind person ForRosePoster must be!

Yep, totally ignorant to everything I have been saying. You crack on love, carry on posting crap and ignoring me but this will be my last reply to you.

I'm off to care for my mum for the afternoon.

Enjoy your afternoon of endless mumsnetting knitting, crocheting, reading and everything else other than using the internet as I know you are so against it.

MN victim blaming at its finest: "my phone was hacked while using NHS open wifi"
response: "Serves you right for being online. That will teach you to read a book instead". (Said repeatedly by someone using the internet).
This place sometimes; honestly.

I'm very sorry the OP has had such a tough time and lost money but I'm really dubious about the idea that just by logging onto WiFi someone can somehow slip into your bank if you haven't logged onto it?
Is there a proper techy MN person who could explain?

Then start your own thread. This is not the place to bang this drum.

im sorry OP. Sounds scary.

Thank goodness Barclays was on the ball. I think I was lucky when I spent 2 weeks in hospital on bed rest, without visitors all, I could do was spend time online/on my Kindle but no-one tried to hack my account.

I am a techy person, and yes this is unlikely.

One of the biggest risks with free wifi is how to guarantee you are on the free Starbucks/hospital/whatever wifi and not a man in a van who has spun up a hospital wifi 2 type thing.
Connected to actual official wifi is generally safe because they can see what websites your on, but not what youre doing etc.

@ForRosePoster - You've made your point; time to put your spade down and stop digging!

Yes and if you register for the fake wifi using the same password as you use for other sites or a 123 type.

My card got hacked recently, fortunately I had notifications switched on on my banking app and saw the first one flash up so I could freeze the card before any more happened (there were several more attempts over half an hour). I am telling everyone to make sure their banking app alerts are switched on now. I think mine was from use on a spoofed website, I had a transaction that didn't go through on a website I hadn't used before a few weeks earlier and assumed it was OK as nothing happened immediately.

I think Barclays is telling you a story and deliberately making you believe it was your fault (rather than theirs). The open wifi (man in the middle) attack works because Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) is insecure. It can be intercepted and the data packets stolen and decoded. But if you look at most modern websites, they use Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (https). You can see it if you look at the Mumsnet URL - it says HTTPS rather than HTTP. This encrypts the data passing between your device and the serving device, so it can't be read by third parties. Modern browsers actively warn the user that they are going to an unsecure website and it's such a faff to override the warning that I don't think it's likely that you, in a distracted and emotional state, would do so.

So I suspect you've been a victim of some other fraud, possibly a large scale data leak from a provider you have used a while ago, and Barclays are spinning you a bit of a yarn.

tl;dr - don't blame yourself, this almost certainly wasn't because of your use of wifi in hospital.

By the way, if you're using https it doesn't matter if you've connected to a spurious wifi network. The attack would only work if you entered your payment details into a forged website spun up by an attacker. If you are worried, you may want to install a VPN service on your device now (Nord VPN for example) which will also encrypt your traffic regardless of your connection by routing it through a "tunnel" to the VPN provider's own, trusted servers..

@ForRosePoster I am guessing you've never been at St George's in London where there's is pretty much zero phone and WiFi signal unless you use the hospital WiFi.
It's pretty much the first thing they tell you to do with your phone (how to log in to the WiFi) while also apologising for the signal being terrible.

Wow. That's shocking.

My bank won't let me access my account from open wifi, so I thought I was relatively safe. But this is an eye opener.

Thanks for this, @roundaboutthehillsareshining.

Sorry about the berk on your thread earlier, OP.