A popular fixture for any home network is a wireless router. I personally don't have one, but if I had a laptop I most likely would have one. It is one of those "must haves" for anyone with a broadband connection (cable or DSL) and one or more computers, of which at least one is a laptop.
There is, however, an inherent danger with a wireless router. The allure of a wireless router is the fact that there are no wires. You can have your laptop out on the patio and still have your Internet connection. What very few people seem to realize is that the same technology that makes it possible for you to be out on your patio and be connected can also allow a would-be attacker to use your open connection to attack at will without being detected. Before you become frightened to no end by this prospect, only some of the scenarios involve an attacker accessing your network and doing damage to your computers. An equally likely scenario is that an attacker could use your connection to anonymously attack someone or something else, such as a corporate network. The real down side of this is that if traced back, it looks as though you were the attacker.
There is help, though. I have several steps here that, while a network can never be completely secured against any possible attack, it will secure it to the point that your open connection won't be so easily mis-appropriated.
Change the administrator password - Manufacturers of routers usually supply a convenient way of accessing web pages to access the router and make changes to the settings. In order to make changes, a username and password are required for entry. By changing the username and the password both to something other than the default, it makes it more difficult for an attacker to gain access to your router in order to change the settings for themselves to use your connection.
Turn on encryption - Wireless routers offer the ability to encrypt the data packets that are transmitted and received across it. This will also require the devices on the wireless network to have encryption turned on, as well. A good wireless router should allow up to 128-bit encryption. Without getting into a whole lecture on what bits are, let me just say that the more bits there are in the encryption, the more difficult it is to hack it. The encryption may have to be adjusted downward if one or more devices on the network do not support 128-bit encryption. Suffice it to say, what you want to do here is to turn on encryption. How strong the encryption depends on what is supported. The router and all devices have to be set to what the lowest device supports. This means that if you have a laptop that only supports 40-bit encryption, but the other computers and the router support 128-bit, then either you have to set all of them to 40-bit or not use the laptop on the network. Personally, if I had a case like this, I would opt for the 128-bit encryption and find a way to upgrade the one laptop so it does support 128-bit. The choice is yours. Bear in mind that even weak encryption is better than no encryption at all.
Go To Page: 1 2
