Protect Your Wireless Network
In order to protect your home wireless network, it would be ideal to use more than one method. In this article I will explain the different measures each user can take to get the most effective security out of a consumer device (such as a Linksys) router/access point.
One of the first steps to securing your wireless network would be to set an encryption key. This key would stop unauthorized people from accessing your network. This is often done by people who “war drive” and log on to unsecured networks. Unfortunately, when your network remains unsecured to war drivers, you have the chance to have your data compromised along with a few other things. In regard to network keys, there are many different settings or options that may be used. When setting up the encryption, you might be prompted to use WEP, WPA, or WPA2. Each of these methods has different ways of protecting your data. I will spare you the technical details for now. In short, WPA and WPA2 would be your best; however, if WPA is not available, you can use WEP.
In conjunction with wireless encryption, users may also turn off SSID broadcast. What is the SSID you may ask? The SSID is the name of your network. The wireless access point broadcasts the SSID so that users can find the network with ease and connect by simply double clicking on that particular “SSID name” in the available wireless connections window. As an added layer of protection, I recommend turning SSID broadcast off. This will make it a little harder for someone to find your network. The only downside to this would be that any other user beside yourself would need to know the SSID before connecting to your wireless network. This would be done in the wireless network preferences when creating a connection.
Finally, we will touch on MAC filtering. Some wireless access points have this option and some don’t. For access points the ones that do, I strongly recommend using this feature. The way this works is simple, it is basically like an access control list. Each piece of hardware (in this case your network card or wireless card) is assigned what is called a MAC address. This is a unique address that identifies the hardware manufacturer and the type of device it is. In the options for your wireless access point you can set which MAC addresses have the option to connect. This will simply weed out any unauthorized MAC address such as a war driver from accessing your network.
You might be asking “How does one attain a MAC address?” Simple! Click Start, go to run, type “cmd”, and then hit enter. This should open a command line with a blinking curser. At this point, type ipconfig/all and hit enter. Find your wireless card and look at the MAC address. Enter the address into your access control list, apply the changes and PRESTO!
If you’re still unsure how to complete this process to secure your computer, and personal files, please contact our support team. They will look at your wireless network for free and advise you on all of the things you can do to secure yourself! For the best in computer repair visit our main site.
