6 Steps to Secure Your Home Wireless Network
Most of you
might have enabled wireless encryption, which is only one of the 6 steps
mentioned in this article to make your wireless network safe and secure from
hackers. The screenshots mentioned below are from Linksys wireless
router. But, you’ll find similar options for all the 6 steps mentioned below in
wireless routers from any other vendors.
1. Enable Encryption
Let us start with the basics. Most of the wireless router has the encryption
disabled by default. Make sure to enable either WPA or WPA2 wireless
encryption. Click on
Wireless -> Wireless Security , to
enable the encryption and assign a password as shown in Fig-1. Following are
the different wireless encryption options available.
- WEP (Wired Equivalent
Protection) 64-bit and 128-bit: WEP is an old wireless encryption
standard. Never use WEP encryption, which can be hacked within seconds.
- WPA (Wi-Fi Protected
Access): WPA-PSK is also refered as WPA-Personal. This is a new
version of wireless encryption standard and more secure than WEP. Most of
the wireless adapters on your laptop will support WPA.
- WPA2: This
is the latest wireless encryption standard that provides the best
encryption. Always use WPA2, if both your wireless router and laptop
wireless adapter supports it.
Fig-1 Enable Wireless
Encryption
2. Change the SSID name
SSID (Service Set Identifier) refers to the name of your
wireless connection, that you see on the “Available Wireless Connections” list
from your laptop while connecting. Changing the wireless name itself
doesn’t offer any protection, but usually discourages a hacker, as they know
that you’ve taken some steps to secure your wireless connection. Click on
Wireless
-> Basic wireless settings -> Change the “Wireless Network Name (SSID):”,
as shown in the Fig-2.
3. Disable SSID broadcast
You can avoid your wireless name from getting displayed on “Available
Wireless Connections” on all your neighbors laptop. This can be done by
instructing the wireless router not to broadcast the name to everybody. Once
you’ve disabled the SSID broadcast, the first time when someone wants to
connect to your wireless network, you need to provide the name to them. Click
on
Wireless -> Basic wireless settings -> Click on the Disable
radio-button next to “Wireless SSID Broadcast”, as shown in Fig-2.
4. Enable MAC filtering
Even after you have performed the above item#1 – #3, a very determined
hacker may still get access to your network. The next security step is to allow
wireless access only to your trusted laptops, by allowing wireless connection
only to known MAC address.
MAC (Media Access Control) address
is an unique identifier attached to most network adapters. In this case, this
should be the unique identifier of your laptop wireless adapter. On
Linux, do
ifconfig from the command prompt to get wireless
hardware address. On windows, do
ipconfig /all from the
command prompt to identify the MAC address as shown below.
C:>ipconfig /all
Ethernet adapter Wireless Network Connection:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : socal.rr.com
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-Card
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00:1A:92:2B:70:B6
Click on
Wireless -> Wireless MAC filter -> Click on Enable
radio-button next to “Wireless MAC filter” -> Click on “Permit only PCs
listed to access the wireless network” radio-button, as shown in Fig-3.
Click on
Edit MAC filter list and add the MAC address of your laptop
to this list. If you want to allow access to more than one laptop, add the MAC
address of all the laptops to this list as shown in Fig-4 and click on
“Save
Settings”.
5. Change password for Web Access
The default password for wireless web access are the same for the specific
model of a wireless router assigned by the manufacturer. Change the default
password of the wireless router web access to a strong password.. Click on
Administration
-> Management, to change the password as shown in Fig-5 below.
6. Disable administrative access through web
As a final step, make sure to disable web administrative access through
wireless. Once you do this, to make any configuration changes to the wireless
router, you can always use ethernet cable connection from your laptop to
configure the wireless. Click on
Administration -> Management
-> Disable radio-button next to “Wireless Access Web”, as shown in
Fig-5 above.
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