Zürich airport wi-fi safe?
 

I hope this thread is ok in this forum category, please move if not.
Last Friday I logged on to the free wi-fi at Zürich airport (actually I believe this is the official airport free wi-fi, and I used it earlier, so my phone connected automatically) and I started to experience strange things on my phone.
1. Default search bar in Safari seemed like re-directed. I usually type 'my_airport_name' metar into the search bar to check the direction we are expected to land, and I got completely different results last Friday than I used to.
2. At some point, google implicitly put a message on my phone that the site (i.e. what I believed to be google) is compromised, so I should not proceed.
3. The corporate security app I have on my phone alerted for high severity threat, Malware Network Trafic.

I use a device which is considered relatively safe, and this was the first time in my life I have seen such strange things, so I thought I ask around in the forum if you have experienced such a thing at Zurich.

If you are concerned about security you should not go on a public WIFI. When ever I do banking and such I always go on the celular network.

I am in general familiar with the security risks of free and unprotected networks, still, Zürich would be one of my last bets for a compromised wi-fi network. I have software on my phone that is most likely more advanced than an average such phone used in Zurich, I just wanted to check if others had a similar experience recently. Either I had managed to log in to a spoofed wi-fi last November when I last connected to Zürich and this network was still up last Friday(unlikely), or the connection seems to have been compromised.

ZRH airport wifi requries you to login each time you pass thru, the old credentials from a previous visit are still good for a year, but don't eliminate the login step. See the instruction pdf here: https://www.zurich-airport.com/passe...ernet-und-wifi

The SSID of the official ZRH airport wifi is ZurichAirport.

I always use a VPN when connecting to any public wifi.

Google will change your search results based on where you are. Living here, a good number of my top search hits are in German. If I search for a tech product all of the ads returned will be local Swiss vendors.

Depending on your browser settings, this should not be possible. Just go to the website of your search engine and check the connection settings.

When you log on, your phone will usually allow the first connection to be hijacked for the login process. The credentials in that case should indicate that they are compromised and if done properly, the URL should look different.
I do that too but it really does eat into speed. And for https connections, it adds next to no security.

Considering Flyertalk hasn't managed to remove malicious adds, I'd be more afraid of using Flyertalk on a mobile device rather than Zurich airport WLAN ;)

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/tech...see-132-a.html

Never had any issues with ZRH Wi-Fi ... and I always use a VPN on my iPhone.

I'm not sure, but perhaps the OP is referring to the warning page which comes up when being redirected to the official airport landing page. You have to confirm that you accept being redirected to an unsecure page ... I find this a bit annoying, but as we know, Zurich Airport is totally clueless in terms of IT. Probably it's only a certificate which expired because they forgot to pay the licensing fee ...