How do I identify a railway station’s official WiFi [duplicate]

While I was waiting in the Nottingham railway station I wanted to connect to the WiFi. However, I found 4 unsecured WiFi networks:

TheCloud
_Notts City Free WiFi
NET WiFi
NCTX WiFi

I had no idea which one was official, and which might be fake ones provided by people intent on stealing my browsing habits.

Is there any way to determine the official WiFi? Would railway staff members know? Is there a list of WiFi networks in UK railway stations somewhere?

An answer that is applicable to railway stations in general would be great - I go through a lot and asking a question here for 8 different stations seems a bit silly.

Finally - I know public WiFi is deemed untrusted, so I use a VPN which I do trust and browse with Safari, rather than the official Apps, so that I can see the green padlock indicating HTTPS.

uk trains wifi

Best Answer

As with the question on airports, there is NO general answer to this. Free public Wi-Fi is inherently insecure - even if you connect to the correct hotspot (and there's no way to tell if you're connecting to the correct hotspot), anyone also connected could use various spoofing techniques to intercept your traffic. If you need to use non-HTTPS websites and don't want to be vulnerable to various attacks, you need to use some other service like a VPN to ensure all of your connections are encrypted.

In your particular case, assuming no spoofing is going on:

TheCloud is probably from a shop or something, or perhaps the station itself. It's a free Wi-Fi "chain" owned by Sky.
_Notts City Free WiFi sounds like a city-wide Wi-Fi system in Nottingham. It's not railway-specific.
NET WiFi is the Wi-Fi from the Nottingham Express Transit, that is, the trams.
NCTX WiFi is Wi-Fi from Nottingham City Transport.