Whenever you purchase a typical run of the mill home wireless router you have 2 choices for the type of security, WEP and WPA. While it is important to protect your wireless network, it is also important to know that both WPA and WEP passwords can be easily cracked. Just do a Google search and you will see what I mean.
On that note, here are a few things you can do to help protect your wireless network:
- Do not broadcast your SSID (router name). This is usually an option in the router configuration pages. In order to connect to the wireless network you must know the SSID. So it goes without saying, you should make the SSID/router name something unique.
- If possible, restrict the number of allowed DHCP addresses. If you know there are only 3 computers on your network, configure your router to only give out 3 addresses. This would prevent anyone else from getting an IP from your router, even if they were connected.
- (More advanced) Disable DHCP totally and run with an uncommon subnet (for example, 192.168.132.X). With DHCP disabled, you would have to manually configure the IP addresses on your computers, but if you only connect to your home network, this is just a one time setup.
- Regardless, still use WEP/WPA security.
As with everything, greater security means less convenience so just keep that in mind if you decide to make changes..
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Both of the wireless routers I’ve owned also allowed me to restrict connections from a list of MAC addresses. Intuitively, this seems like pretty strong protection – the MAC address space is *big*, so a brute-force attack would seem pointless.
MAC addresses can be spoofed, so an attacker can just spoof a MAC address of one of your allowed devices.
If you have a wireless router, and you don’t use the wireless feature, turn it off. This can be done in the setup. Routers usually come with this feature enabled with no security.
How about WPA2?
Same thing applies. Google search it and you will see.