Wifi is a technological innovations that allows devices to exchange internet connections wirelessly i.e without the use of network cables.
Securing your wifi is important in order to prevent unwanted and unauthourized usage of bandwidth, thereby making your wireless network accessible only by those you give authourization to.
How to Secure your Wifi
1. Install a Firewall A firewall helps protect
your PC by preventing
unauthorized users from gaining access to
your computer through the
Internet or a network. It acts as a barrier
that checks any information
coming from the Internet or a network, and
then either blocks the
information or allows it to pass through to
your computer.
2. Change the Administrative Password on
your Wireless Routers Each
manufacturer ships their wireless routers
with a default password for easy
initial access. These passwords are easy to
find on vendor support sites, and
should therefore be changed immediately.
3. Change the Default SSID Name and Turn
Off SSID Broadcasting This will
require your wireless client computers to
manually enter the name of your
SSID (Service Set Identifier) before they
can connect to your network,
greatly minimizing the damage from the
casual user whose laptop is
configured to connect to any available SSID
broadcast it finds. You should
also change the SSID name from the
factory default, since these are just as
well-known as the default passwords
4. Disable DHCP For a SOHO network with
only a few computers, consider
disabling DHCP (Dynamic Host
Configuration Protocol) on your router and
assigning IP addresses to your client
computers manually. On newer wireless
routers, you can even restrict access to the
router to specific MAC
addresses.
5. Replace WEP with WPA WEP (Wired
Equivalent Privacy) is a security
protocol that was designed to provide a
wireless computer network with a
level of security and privacy comparable to
what is usually expected of a
wired computer network. WEP is a very
weak form of security that uses
common 60 or 108 bit key shared among all
of the devices on the network
to encrypt the wireless data. Hackers can
access tools freely available on the
Internet that can crack a WEP key in as
little as 15 minutes. Once the WEP
key is cracked, the network traffic instantly
turns into clear text – making it
easy for the hacker to treat the network
like any open network. WPA (Wi-Fi
Protected Access) is a powerful, standards-
based, interoperable security
technology for wireless computer networks.
It provides strong data
protection by using 128-bit encryption keys
and dynamic session keys to
ensure a wireless computer network's
privacy and security. Many
cryptographers are confident that WPA
addresses all the known attacks on
WEP. It also adds strong user
authentication, which was absent in WEP.
Do you know of other ways of securing wifi network?
Why not get in touch with us by leaving a comment.
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