TAMPA — Tampa International Airport was ranked this week as the 10th safest U.S. airport to go online without being hacked, but the ranking is not only about the place, but also about how savvy its travelers are.
The data security firm Coronet ranked the nation's 45 busiest airports. To identify the riskiest ones, the company collected data for five months from more than 250,000 of the millions of devices equipped with its SecureCloud software.
In that data, Coronet looked for Wi-Fi network risks as well as devices' use of updated and active anti-malware and firewalls, device password protections, trusted apps and operating systems, storage encryption and privileged user accounts and permissions. Thus, the rankings are based both on the presence of potential attackers lurking in Wi-Fi networks and on how vulnerable are the devices that passengers and others bring to the airport themselves.
In June, Coronet ranked the Tampa Bay area as the nation's 10th most vulnerable metropolitan area to cybersecurity threats, based partly on its finding that 1 in 20 devices in the region are running with non-original operating systems.
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Miami was the ninth most data-secure airport on the list. Here are the bottom four, where maybe you should just buy a magazine unless you've taken steps to avoid playing Wi-Fi roulette: San Diego International Airport, John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, Calif., William P. Hobby Airport in Houston and Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers.
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