Tips for Securing your Home Wifi Network

By: Jim Faller


As consumers upgrade their computers and laptops and are
discovering the convenience of wireless computing, they may also
be opening themselves up to attacks from random hackers. If you
have a home network and it has wireless capabilities one of the
most important things you can do to protect yourself, your
computers and most importantly your data, is to secure your
network. You may think you are doing a good thing leaving your
wireless network open for your neighbors to use, but you may
also be allowing people to use your network to download pirated
music or movies (which you will be responsible for), send
unsolicited commercial email (aka spam) or launch viruses.

Securing your network is fairly easy and can be done by just
about anyone, even if you aren't computer savvy. If you are
using a laptop you may want to connect your computer via
ethernet cable to your router, while you are making the
configuration changes. The first thing you should do is log into
your wireless router and change the administration password and
username if possible. Leaving the default settings is like
locking your door and hiding a key under the mat. Next you want
to enable WEP (wireless equivalent privacy) security on your
router. If your router has 128 bit encryption use it, it's more
secure than 40 bit encryption. If you have an older router you
may only have 40 bit encryption, 40 bit encryption is better
than no encryption so if that's all you have use it. You will
need to enter the corresponding WEP encryption key on all of
your computers that connect wirelessly. Reboot the router and
verify you can still connect with the network cable removed. It
would be easier to make all of the changes at once and the
reboot, but if you make a mistake doing it step by step helps
you find your mistakes easier.

The next step is changing the SSID (Service Set Identifier). The
first thing you should do is change the name from its default
setting. If your router lets you disable the SSID broadcast you
should. Again make the corresponding changes on each of the
computers that connect wirelessly and reboot the router. Once
the router reboots make sure you can still connect to the
network.

Your next step is to allow access via Mac addresses. Every
computer has a unique Mac address that looks like
0A-3C-2A-55-E4-A0. Get all of the MAC addresses of all of the
computers that connect wirelessly and restrict access on the
router to only those Mac addresses. Reboot the router and verify
you can still connect.

While these tips won't keep out sophisticated professional
hackers they will keep out casual snoopers. Lastly on each
computer make sure you are sharing only the folders that you
want other people to be able to see.

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About the author:
Jim Faller is an author for http://computers.6ln.com which has
information about computer security, viruses, spyware, data
recovery and backups