When you connect to a Wi-Fi network on your iPhone, you may see the words “Security Recommendation” appear beneath its name. This is a warning that you’re connected to either an unsecured network or one encrypted with weak WEP security.
Unsecured Networks and Weak Security
If you tap the name of the Wi-Fi network displaying “Security Recommendation” once you’re connected to it, you’ll see a more informative message.
In most cases, your iPhone will tell you that the current network is an “Unsecured Network”, also known as an open network. These networks don’t require any passphrase to connect and, therefore, don’t have any encryption.
You can tell which networks are secured with encryption and which ones aren’t by looking at the list of networks before you connect. Any network with a lock icon next to it is encrypted and requires a passphrase. Any network without a lock icon is open (or “unsecured”) and won’t require a passphrase.
This message will also appear when you connected to a hotspot encrypted with outdated WEP encryption instead of modern WPA2 encryption. You’ll instead see a “Weak security” message that says “WEP is not considered secure”.
That’s because WEP is an older encryption scheme that can be very easily compromised. You shouldn’t be using WEP, if possible. Modern WPA2 security with AES encryption is ideal.
Why Unsecured (and Weakly Secured) Networks Are Bad
As the error message explains, “Open networks provide no security and expose all your network traffic.” This means that anyone nearby can connect to the Wi-Fi network without entering a passphrase. If this is your home network, that’s is a big problem—it means that anyone nearby can connect and possibly do illegal things that would be traced back to your IP address. This is why we seriously recommend against hosting an open Wi-FI network.
This lack of encryption also means there’s no protection against someone snooping on your web browsing traffic. Anyone nearby can capture your traffic and examine it. Thankfully, there is still protection when you visit websites encrypted with HTTPS encryption. However, any website that uses HTTP encryption would not provide any security against someone eavesdropping. And, even if you were accessing services that used HTTPS encryption, anyone nearby could tell which websites you were connecting to.
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