[Peon]

My hotel room has an Ethernet jack, which got me thinking - given the way LANs work, isn't this basically on the level of open wifi in terms of (in)security, and far more risky than connecting via WPA2/AES, which the hotel also provides?

I'm sure the hotel's IT department has segmented guest network traffic from hotel corporate network traffic, but I doubt they'd go as far as creating a separate VLAN for each individual hotel room...

 

[XAslanX]

As someone that works in the infosec industry, I always treat any and all public multiuser open or free wifi as a risk and do not use it without first connecting to my home VPN server. Depending on how you are logging into the network to use it, be a general password they give to customers or individual log in credentials to each person, I would be very careful about the type of information I enter on these networks.

I just turn on the VPN server on my Asus router and log in and use my home internet to use the web instead of the public network whenever I am away from home. Sure it may be a little bit slower but that security is my number one priority when using public internet.

 

[Peon]

The question is about *relative* security, not absolute security, which frankly does not exist, nor is it about my personal circumstances. FWIW, I'm distrusting to the point where I'm currently tethered to my phone's LTE connection and then connecting via a VPN.

 

[EniGma1987]

I would never assume each room is on its own vlan with segregated traffic from any other room, but is it really that hard for a hotel to make an individual vlan for each room? There are doubtful many hotels in the world with 4000 or more rooms so it shouldn't be a technical problem, and at least on the switches I use it is very easy to create vlans and assign them.

 

[Ulquiorra]

Most dont care, it will be attached to the same switch as the tv's if they are smart most of the time, and some of the time connected to the tills

Connect, spin up tshark and look for broadcast, bet you will see loads of other laptops asking for their DC's, proxy srvers, and file servers.

Treat it the same as public wifi really