How Secure Is Your Wireless Network?
About 80% of people that have high speed Internet, they also usually have a wireless network within their home or office.
So the question is, how secure is your wireless network? Do you have to enter password when you connect to the Internet for the first time on your device? If so, this is a good start. If not, then you really need to reconsider. You might think “what is the worst that could happen?” Well, the answer is – you could go to jail! In an extreme case, a person could use your unsecured network to connect to your Internet service and send threatening letters to someone. If the threats are particularly nasty and the authorities trace the route from where the messages were sent, they might find your IP as the source. [(IP stands for Internet Protocol. This is a set of numbers that identifies where you are in the world. It's very similar to your home address)] Proving you didn’t do it, is not something you want to go through. Especially since it can be a bit embarrassing.
Here is a set of lists of items that can help you secure your Wireless network:
A) Basic Security (The Essentials):
1. Create a password for you network – Every network has a name (the SSID) and should have a password. To do this, you can either use the software and directions that came with your wireless router or login to the wireless router and make the changes yourself (see #2). Your password should have letters and numbers in it, don’t use consecutive numbers (123456) – for example use: “Fluffy63″
2. Change your default wireless router username and password. This is different from you wireless network’s password. This login let’s you access all the settings on your router through your browser. It is usually found by typing in 192.168.1.1 into the address bar. Most commonly usernames are – admin, administrator, or there is not an username. And most commonly, these usernames are paired with a password that is – pass, password, or there isn’t a password. If you do not know the username & password, most routers have a support number that you can call to find out this information, or, of course, you can Google it. This can easily be changed by going into the router’s “administrator settings” or “advanced settings”
B) Intermediate Security – These recommendations are for people that live in apartment complexes, duplexes or other close living areas. It is highly possible that if someone is going to do something illegal on a Internet connection they are going to target wifi connections in these areas.:
1. Do everything in list “A)”
2. Your wireless password needs to be a l little more complex than just a few letters & numbers. It is recommended to use a few random words strung together with a few numbers thrown in – for example: “television3horse2magazine” Passwords like these take a significant amount of time to decode if someone attempts to access your Internet connection and most likely will give up and move on.
C) Maximum Security – a majority of people will not need to take these measures, it’s not to say that people do not need it. Even the writer of this article has had his wireless networked cracked into (figured out the password and was able to wreck havoc. Not fun.) Or you may have followed the above steps and are still having issues with pain-in-the-butt 8 year-old computer-genius that keeps using your connection to view porn or download torrents [(torrenting is the ability to download files at high speeds by connecting to multiple people at once. This is also a common practice to download movies illegally. This i something else that can get you in big trouble if it's traced back to you)] People that want to have the absolute maximum security for their wireless networks can follow this list. Most of these settings, you’ll have to login to your router to access and will require someone with a bit of technical knowledge to accomplish.:
1. Follow the steps in lists A & B
2. Hide your network. With wireless networks, you can either make your network visible or invisible. If the network is invisible, a majority of Internet users will never know it’s there. That’s not to say it cannot be found, it just makes it harder. The setting you will be looking for is “SSID name broadcast.” By disabling the SSID name broadcast, your wireless network will still be there, it just won’t be seen to the naked eye. When someone accesses your network in the future, they will likely have to “connect to other network,” input the name of the network (SSID) and the password to gain access to your network. It’s a few extra steps to get connected, but it’s worth it.
3. Set a complicated password. The password to your wireless connection should be between 16 – 20 characters long, should contain letters (both upper & lower case), numbers and symbols.
4. MAC Address filtering – This should be used with caution. This can make things incredibly complicated if you have people coming and going within you wireless network. This is not recommended at a business unless you have a set number of devices on the connection and want nothing else. [A MAC address is much like an IP address; however, they differ in that an IP acts as a software address and a MAC address is a hardware address. IP addresses can change per device. MAC addresses never will.] By filtering the MAC addresses of devices you want on your network, you can keep out people you don’t want. People will literally not be capable of connecting to your wifi router whether they have the name of your network and password or not. The setting you are looking for will likely be under advanced settings. It might appear as “set filter” or ” set up access list” or “filter MAC addresses” an example of a MAC address is: 11:C7:18:E6:H8:86 . These addresses can be found on a label on your device or by going to the location on your operating system to view information about your connection. In order to add someone to your network, you will have to add the MAC address to your router each time before they enter your wifi connection credentials to connect.
Hopefully these steps will help your network become more secure. There is, however; one last thing to keep in mind. Make sure you have a working, PAID, anti-virus like Kaspersky or Norton running on you devices (not necessary for most Apple computers nor iOS devices.) if perhaps you were to get a virus on computer A, and computer B didn’t have a working anti-virus, that infection can speed very quickly to the other computers. Then your computer and it’s wifi network it is connected to, is at the mercy of the infection. Vehicle tracking