If you have ever stayed in a short-term rental (like an Airbnb, HomeAway, or CouchSurfing), you have probably used the wifi network at that rental property. Why wouldn’t you? It’s no different than hopping on an open wifi network at an airport, or a Starbucks, or your friend’s house, right?

One major difference: the hardware is easily accessible to previous guests at the short-term rental. Previous guests could tamper with the software on a router, and use that tampering to do some malicious, surveillant things.

Jeremy Galloway is a security engineer at Atlassian. In today’s show, he explains the risk of using wifi at a short-term rental like an Airbnb–including an explanation of how easy it is to take over a wifi network as a guest at a rental property.

A broader point we discuss: large attack surfaces are difficult to secure. Whether we are talking about Airbnb, or another sharing economy app like Uber, or a large corporate network like Atlassian, or even your own personal life. Jeremy offers some best practices and philosophies for how to respond to the modern world of security.

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