You’re killing time at the airport, your flight’s delayed (again), and that free WiFi is calling your name. A few rounds of your favorite game couldn’t hurt, right? Well, it depends on how much you value your account.
Here’s the thing most gamers don’t think about: public networks are hunting grounds. Kaspersky tracked over 6.6 million attack attempts in 2024 that used popular games as bait. Fortnite and Apex Legends accounts got hit especially hard. We’re talking stolen skins, drained wallets, and compromised payment info. The attacks jumped 30% in the first half of 2024 compared to the previous six months.
Your Steam library probably has hundreds (maybe thousands) of dollars in games. PlayStation and Xbox wallets store real money. Epic accounts hold V-Bucks. One bad WiFi connection can cost you years of progress and purchases you can’t get back.
Public WiFi Wasn’t Built for You
Airport lounges, coffee shops, hotel lobbies, university common areas. They all share the same problem: nobody running these networks prioritizes your security. Most public WiFi doesn’t encrypt anything. Your data travels in plain text, readable by anyone who knows where to look.
Attackers love this setup. They sit between you and the router, grabbing everything that passes through. Gamers make especially great targets because our accounts hold payment details, linked credit cards, and items that sell for real money on grey markets. A game proxy can block this kind of snooping by encrypting your traffic and hiding your real IP. Without that layer, someone watching the network sees your login credentials, session data, and personal info while you’re busy trying to clutch the round.
Gaming makes this worse because you’re connected for long stretches. Twenty minutes, an hour, sometimes longer. That’s a lot of time for bad actors to work with compared to someone checking email for thirty seconds.
How They Actually Get You
The classic attack is simpler than you’d expect. A man-in-the-middle attack happens when someone creates a fake WiFi hotspot with a believable name. “Starbucks_Guest_WiFi” or “Hilton_Lobby_Free” takes maybe five minutes to set up. Connect to that, and all your traffic routes through their laptop first.
Session hijacking is sneakier. Attackers grab your session cookies from the unencrypted connection and basically clone your login on their own device. They don’t even need your password. They’re wearing your digital identity, making purchases or trading away your items while you’re still playing.
Then there’s DNS spoofing. You think you’re logging into Steam or Epic, but the page is fake. Looks identical, works the same way, except it sends your credentials straight to whoever built it. Thousands of accounts get compromised this way every month.
What Actually Works
Proxies route your connection through secure servers before it hits the public network. Your real IP stays hidden, your traffic gets encrypted, and the coffee shop WiFi just sees scrambled data heading somewhere else. For gaming specifically, proxies often work better than VPNs because they don’t trigger the same blocks or slowdowns.
Speaking of VPNs, NIST’s security guidelines explain how properly configured ones encrypt everything at the network level. Solid protection, but some games actively block VPN traffic or tank your ping. Worth testing before you rely on one.
Multi-factor authentication is the single best thing you can do for every gaming account. Steam Guard, PlayStation’s verification, Xbox authenticator. All free, all effective. Even if someone grabs your password, they’re stuck without that second code. No excuse not to have this enabled.
Quick Habits That Help
Turn off auto-connect for WiFi before you leave home. Your laptop or Steam Deck shouldn’t join “HomeNetwork” at an airport just because some guy named his hotspot that way.
After using public WiFi, make your device forget the network. Otherwise it’ll reconnect automatically next time, potentially to a compromised version of that same network.
Mobile hotspots from your phone are way safer than public WiFi. Cellular connections are much harder to intercept. The data you’re already paying for could save your entire game library.
When Things Go Wrong
Expect that something will eventually get compromised. Sounds paranoid, but it’s practical. Write down your recovery email, phone number, and security questions somewhere offline. You’ll need them fast if your account gets locked.
Use different passwords for different platforms. Password managers like Bitwarden handle this automatically. When one service gets breached, your other accounts stay safe.
Public gaming is convenient. It’s also risky if you’re careless. A proxy, MFA, and some common sense go a long way toward keeping your accounts intact no matter where you’re playing from.
