How To Access Your Online Accounts While Traveling Abroad

Accessing your online accounts including banking and email accounts from hotel lobbies and internet cafes can be a good way to get your information stolen. You can never trust other peoples computers, you never really know how good the security at any given location might be. I’ve only gotten my information stolen one time and that was in the Dominican Republic when I used the computer in the hotel lobby.

If you’re planning on traveling and you’ll need to access your online accounts I recommend you take these few precautions just to make sure your information doesn’t get stolen by some keylogger, or some packet sniffing program installed on some foreign network.

Always use an https:// before the intended address. If you need to access your gmail account, use https://www.gmail.com instead of just http://www.gmail.com. The HTTPS means that the connection between the web browser that you’re using and the website you’re accessing will be encrypted, and if anyone happens to capture the network traffic, your information will be safe. But this step doesn’t safeguard you from keyloggers.

There is really no way to defeat a keylogger effectively. The only thing I recommend to be 100% sure your accounts are not compromised is to access your bank accounts only via phone. Most banks have international numbers you can call, but it’s not hard to reach the 1800 customer service numbers from foreign countries. Wherever you are, just ask how to call the United States, or whatever country your from, and they’ll give the codes to dial before you enter the number. In this way you avoid access your banking accounts from an infected computer.

Email is a different story. You won’t be able to access your email via phone, but what I recommend is to set a temporary password before your trip. Use this password while traveling and accessing your email from computers abroad, and then change the password as soon as you get back. If you’re traveling for an extended period of time, I would suggest changing the password every two or three weeks, or every month at the most. Although changing the passwords might seem like hassle, it only takes two minutes and it can give you piece of mind and save you headaches in case you do use a computer that was compromised with keyloggers or trojans.

I would also the the same for chat clients. If you’re going to be accessing chat clients abroad you can use a temporary password while chatting and never share personal information such as account numbers or other important identifiers over chat programs while traveling abroad. As with email you can change your password once you get back home.

Finally, remember to always close all sessions including email and chat. And if you know how to remove cookies or clear private data, do this as well before you leave any computer you might be using.

What if you have your own computer?
If you bring your own laptop, and you run good security on your laptop including a firewall and antivirus, then things will be much safer, all I would suggest then is to access HTTPS urls only.

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