How Do You Secure Wireless Routers And Computers?
With wireless networking becoming the easiest and most economical way to set up a home network, I get lots of questions about how to make sure it’s secure. Doing so will prevent your neighbors from using your bandwidth to surf the internet and protect the shared resources on your network. Here are some tips for securing your wireless router/access point and computers with wireless adapters: • Change the defaults. Wireless routers come with a preset administrator password and SSID (network name). These are usually the same for all routers of that model, so it’s common knowledge to hackers. A hacker can use that info to change your WAP settings or connect to your network. • Turn off SSID broadcasting. SSID broadcasting makes your network visible to anyone in the area who has a wireless-equipped computer. Turning it off doesn’t hide it from WLAN “sniffers” but it does keep the neighbors from knowing you have a wireless network. • Turn on MAC address filtering. This allows only computers w
