How to Secure Your Home Wireless Network – Guiding Tech

There was a time when each home had only one computer and one internet connection, often delivered via a telephone modem. Today, everything has changed. There are usually two or more computers in the same household, and often at least one of them is a laptop.

If you want all of these computers to be able to connect to the internet, it’s not feasible to have a separate connection for each computer, and it’s also impractical to rewire your house with an Ethernet cable for your own Local Area Network (LAN).

Then the best option is to have your own Wi-Fi Router that allows each device to access the internet (and each other’s, of course) from any point within range. With the advent of smartphones like the iPhone and the Droid, both have inbuilt Wi-Fi access, which just makes connecting easier.

But unlike LAN, Wi-Fi connection does not discriminate in its reach. While the former will only go where you lay out the cables and ports, the wireless network is limited only by the power it gets to in your vicinity.

And so, to prevent strangers from using your bandwidth, hackers from accessing your system, or just throttling your internet usage, you need to secure your wireless router (thus securing your home wireless network).

This article talks about some steps you can take to ensure the security of your home Wi-Fi. It is divided into two segments.

1. Essential wireless security steps

2. Extra Steps for the Overly Paranoid

Essential wireless security steps

Here are the main steps to secure your home wireless network. None of them should be ignored.

1. Set Username and Password for Router

Every Wi-Fi router has an admin web page that can be accessed through your browser. To prevent unauthorized people from accessing your router settings, you need to set a username and password combination for your router.

a) First, after making sure that your computer is connected to the wireless network, visit the address 192.168.1.1 through a web browser. If this is your first time accessing, the username and password will not be asked or will be left blank or will be set to the default settings as provided in the manual. So if you don’t know what it is, check the manual or call the router manufacturer’s tech support (Linksys, Netgear and all).

While normally you need to access the router as 192.168.1.1, in some cases it could be 192.168.2.1 or anything else depending on how your home wireless network is set up.

b) Find the “Administration” or “Management” tab. This will show you the fields you must fill in to change your username and password. It’s important to keep strong passwords that don’t have names or words that are easy to guess.

2. Encrypt your connection with WPA

This is perhaps the most important safeguard in preventing others from accessing your Wi-Fi. By encrypting your connection, only devices with the encryption key can use the wireless network.

You’ll find the location to do this in your router’s “Security” settings. Most routers come with two built-in encryption methods: Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). WEP is known to be easily compromised and therefore WPA should be used. However, if your router doesn’t have WPA, WEP is better than nothing.

Once enabled, any device that wants to use the Wi-Fi connection will be asked to enter the encryption password. This is usually stated on the label underneath your router or with the accompanying documentation. This means that unless a hacker has physical access to your home, it will be difficult for them to compromise your security.

3. Always keep your router firmware up to date

It’s important to keep your router’s firmware up to date. New firmware updates may include better security features and fix bugs that could affect your connection.

Therefore, visit your router manufacturer’s website periodically to check for firmware updates.

4. Control the modem’s power settings

If you’re comfortable enough with tweaking your settings, and if your modem is advanced enough to support that setting, you can manually adjust your modem’s output power however you need.

The higher the power supplied to the antenna, the farther the signal will travel. So by reducing the power to a level where you can barely pick up a signal in a far corner of the house, that leaves less room for your neighbors to use it without permission. Of course, this is less effective in apartments and more in houses.

And of course, when you don’t need it, turn off the modem from the power source. This will also save you on energy costs!

Extra Steps for the Overly Paranoid

While wireless networks are inherently considered insecure and there is no single step that can guarantee absolute security, the steps mentioned above are sufficient for home users looking to protect their Wi-Fi.

However, if you feel that you need to do more and are not satisfied with the process, here are some other steps. Honestly, it won’t matter if you skip the following steps but you can take a look anyway.

1. Stop broadcasting your SSID

The service set identifier or SSID is the name by which your wireless connection is identified. Hiding it will at least prevent the simplest of attacks, although it may not stop sophisticated hackers.

To hide it, simply go to the “Wireless” setting in your Administration page and find the setting you need to Disable it. You should also change the SSID name from the default to a value of your choice so that it is not immediately recognisable.

Note: Disabling SSID broadcasting can also cause someone who is supposed to be connected to your network to connect to some other network because he can’t see your network name (and thus this can affect the security of his computer).

2. Filter by MAC Address

The MAC address has nothing to do with the Apple that makes the iPhone. Every computer made – network card to be exact – has a unique Media Access Control or MAC address.

One way to secure your connection, then, is to have your router only allow access to specific devices with approved MAC addresses. To find out, just go to “Run” in your Start Menu and type “cmd” and press Enter. When you see the user prompt, just type ipconfig /all and hit enter. You will get a screen similar to the following:

Record the MAC address. Next, go to your wireless router’s Administration page and find the MAC address filter settings. They are usually located in the “Security” or “Connection” section.

Enter each address that you want to allow access to manually. Use colons instead of dashes for addresses.

Note: Although looking through the time-consuming steps, this is a pretty effective way to secure the network, but in reality, this method is not difficult to ignore.

In short

A Wi-Fi router can be a very useful device in a networked household. However, it needs to be secure to prevent malicious attacks. The above methods will greatly reduce the risk of any unauthorized access.

Do you know any other methods to secure the wireless network? Why not let us know in the comments.

Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/