Secure Your Wireless Network!

First off….it’s been ages since I last blogged. I’d like to say I’ve been busy, but the truth is I’ve just been bumming around. I’m now a year older by the way, so I should definitely know better.

I was talking to friend only a couple of days ago and I realised that the majority of people leave their wireless network wide open for anyone to use! A few months ago, I went wardriving down my road with my sister’s Ipaq and found 5 access points, 3 of which were completely insecure! That meant I was fully able to access their internet connection and worse still, able to change their wireless router’s access privileges (i.e. make it only accept my set password). This has prompted me to write an article on the simple steps you need to take in order to secure you network. These also apply to wired networks, but as computers need a physical link to the network, it is not as important.

Step 1: Change your SSID

Your SSID (Service Set Identifier) is fundamentally the name that you give your router. By default, this will be set to the manufacturer’s name (e.g Netgear, Belkin, Linksys, etc). If you continue to allow your default SSID, potential hackers will know all the router’s security flaws. By changing it, hackers are obviously oblivious to what router you have, thus making it much more difficult to hack. It also means that hackers will not know your default username and password set by the manufacturer to control all of your internet settings.

Step 2: Change your default username and password

As mentioned, your router username and password ships with the manufacturer’s default values. This can easily be found out by using this list for example. So, in order to save your internet connection from being “stolen” change these default values!

Step 3: Apply MAC address filtering

A MAC (Media Access Control) address is a unique string of characters that every network card in the world has. In order to find out your own MAC address, simply type ipconfig/all in a command prompt window (brought about by going to Start, Run and then typing cmd.exe). The MAC address will be referred to as the Physical Address and is made up of 12 characters e.g. 00-D1-AB-F2-G3-89.

Find out the MAC address for each computer on your network and plug these characters into your router’s settings. This will ensure that only the computers you own/use will be able to access the internet/network.

Step 4: Limit the number of IPs your router assigns

If you only have 3 computers using your wireless network, then ensure that your router can only ever assign 3 IP addresses at any one time. This will make sure that countless other people cannot access your network. Although this point is nullified if you have MAC address filtering enabled, it is still a good backup measure.

All of these settings can be applied by accessing the router’s settings (usually done by accessing the router’s homepage via your internet browser). If you are unsure of how to access your router’s settings, then read the manual that came with it, as they all vary!! (Although many are just http://192.168.0.1 )

Read, learn and most importantly…apply!!

+nicks