Is public Wi-Fi safe for a work laptop?

It is acceptable with a protected laptop and encrypted connections, and risky without them. Most websites and company services already use encryption, so a stranger on the same café or hotel network cannot read the content, but they can see which devices are present, try to attack open services on your laptop or set up a fake network with the same name. Use the company VPN or your phone's hotspot for anything sensitive, keep the laptop's firewall on and file sharing off, treat a certificate warning as a reason to disconnect, and forget the network afterwards so that the laptop does not join it automatically next time. Updates and endpoint protection matter more on the road than in the office. NetSenX does not see the café network. A laptop that runs the agent, on Linux or macOS, has its own connections watched wherever it is, and beaconing or unusual outbound volume raises an alert on every plan.

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