Wireless router security: how to protect your network

Many people who use computer don’t know much about networking in general and a lot less about wireless networks and their security problems, far greater than those posed by wired networks. Risks are now higher than ever as many home feature one Internet connection shared to all computers in the house through a network provided by a wireless router.

In this article I will try and explain how you can secure your wireless network. You’ll need a minimum of computer knowledge, but I’ll try and post links to resources that explain best various terms that I’ll use in this post. I won’t be posting a screenshot step by step guide as router user interfaces are very different from one to another, but the names you’ll see for various options are the same everywhere. So, let’s get started:

Terms and things you need to know about your wireless router

1. IP address – it’s the Internet address of a connected device, it’s made or four groups of numbers, each with values between 0 and 225.
2. Encryption protocol – the method used to scramble the data being send/received so that someone without proper access right won’t be able to understand.
3. MAC address – it’s the address of the networking interface in a computer. Your router, computer network card, wireless card in your laptop have different MAC addresses (Example: 00-81-7D-31-3B-C4)
4. Network SSID (Service Set identifier) – is the name of the wireless network you’re creating with the router. When you search for networks in range or connect to a network that’s the identifier.

How to secure your wireless network?

There are a few options to secure a wireless network starting from the router. I’m referring here to security as in “no computer in range of my wireless router can access my network if I don’t grant it access”, I’m not covering Internet security, as it is a much broader subject and includes subjects like Firewalls, Antispyware, Antimalware and Antivirus software.

So, here are the methods you can use to deny unauthorized access to your wireless home network:

1. Hide your network SSID from being broadcasted by the router. In this way a person who want to connect to your wireless network won’t be able to do it unless he know the network exists and its name. Don’t be fooled tough as there are programs that can find wireless networks in range, with or without SSID.
2. Don’t leave the network traffic unsecured. Choose an encryption protocol that offers high security and use a long password with special chars like numbers, -, _, ?, * etc. I recommend using WPA and WPA2 variants, not WEP.
3. Filter MAC addresses that have access to the network. All wireless routers have the option of specifying which MAC addresses of network cards are allowed to connect. This is a very powerful protection method. Find your MAC address in Windows by hitting Start button – Run – cmd.exe and type “ipconfig /all”, then look for your network card name and copy the “Physical address” number.
4. Change your router IP address and password. By default many routers come with passwords like “admin” and IP addresses like 192.168.0.1. Changem both of them to not so easy to guess values.

Those are the most basic and at the same time efficient methods of securing your wireless network at home, so if you do all of them there’s little chance an unexperienced hacker can pass through them, but that doesn’t mean you’re bullet proof. If you have any questions leave a comment bellow and I’ll try and help you.