. There are four easy steps you can take to secure your wireless network. The first thing you should do after the wireless side of the network is securing your wireless router or access point administration interface. All routers have a password to gain access. You should change the password on the router from it default to something that will be hard to guess. You can use a combination of letters, numbers and special characters to create a difficult to break password. You never want to leave your router open. Now that you have your router password protected, lets move on to the ID of the wireless router.
Wireless routers have what is called a service set identifier or SSID. Some wireless routers call this the network name. This is the name that is discovered when searching for wireless networks. Once you have given your router a name, you should change the name from its manufacture default; you now will disable the SSID from being broadcast. By default, all SSID are sent, broadcast, out so other wireless devices that are searching for connections can find it. Since you’re setting the network, no one else needs to know you running wireless. This way if an intruder is trying to find a wireless network in your area, yours will not be found. Your network is invisible. By turning the SSID broadcast off, you will have access as you know the name and can set your devices up to match the SSID name. You have the SSID turned off; another step is to encrypt your transmissions.
Encrypting your communications between your wireless router and your device is critical. Without encrypting the communication, you run the risk of your information being sent over the air, to be captured with ease and easily deciphered. Many wireless routers come with several types of encrypting schemes. Some of the encryption schemes used in today’s wireless routers are, Wired Equivalency Privacy, (WEP), Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), and Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service, (RADIUS). Each of these schemes have their pro and cons, but that is beyond the scope of this paper. As long as you use some type of scheme, that is the important issue. The scheme you use must be supported by any wireless devices that will connect to your wireless router. If you use, WPA, then all the devices must use WPA to gain access. Along with setting the encryption scheme, your must also set the algorithm that the scheme will use to encrypt the data. Once this is completed, you can consider your wires side of your network secure. There is one additional step that is important but not as necessary if you choose to do the steps above. This step is to use MAC address filtering.
MAC address filtering is only letting specific devices whose MAC address is in the routers list of approved devices for connection. If the MAC address of a device is not listed in the allowed list, that device that is trying to connect will be denied access. Although MAC filtering takes time to add the addresses of the devices, it does bring the level of security in your wireless network to a very high state, and will be very hard to break into. You can actually use just MAC address filtering only. Since only allowed devices that are on the allowed address list can connect, an open wireless connection will be very hard to get into. Leaving your wireless network open gives a hacker a challenge, once the hacker knows your network is there. So it is best to do all four steps and the hacker will not have to be faced with a challenge to get into your network.