As the time passes and technology advances, people are upgrading their computers and laptops and are discovering the convenience of wireless computing. If you have a home network and it has wireless capabilities one of the most important things you can do to protect yourself, your computers and most importantly your data, is to secure your network.
You may think you are doing a good thing leaving your wireless network open for your neighbors to use, but you may also be allowing people to use your network to download pirated music or movies for which you are responsible, send unsolicited commercial email (spam) or launch viruses.
Securing your network is fairly easy and anyone can do it, even if you aren’t computer savvy. If you are using a laptop you may want to connect your computer via ethernet cable to your router, while you are making the configuration changes. The first thing you should do is log into your wireless router and change the administration password and username if possible.
Next you want to enable WEP (wireless equivalent privacy) security on your router. If your router has 128 bit encryption use it, it’s more secure than 40 bit encryption. If you have an old router you may only have 40 bit encryption, 40 bit encryption is better than no encryption so if that’s all you have use it. You will need to enter the corresponding WEP encryption key on all of your computers that connect wirelessly. Reboot the router and verify you can still connect with the network cable removed.
The next step is changing the SSID (Service Set Identifier). The first thing you should do is change the name from its default setting. If your router lets you disable the SSID broadcast you should. Again make the corresponding changes on each of the computers that connect wirelessly and reboot the router. Once the router reboots make sure you can still connect to the network.
Your next step is to allow access via Mac addresses. Every computer has a unique Mac address that looks like 0A-3C-2A-55-E4-A0. Get all of the MAC addresses of all of the computers that connect wirelessly and restrict access on the router to only those Mac addresses. Reboot the router and verify you can still connect.
While these tips won’t keep out sophisticated professional hackers but they will keep out casual snoopers.
Last but not least, make sure you are sharing only the folders that you want other people to see on each computer