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.

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Easy you say: use the retrieve password by email function provided by WordPress! This should always work, but there are some situations when it doesn’t: your email account cannot be accessed for some reason, you changed the username and don’t remember which is it, you gaved admin rights to a guest blogger and it changed your password (that’s a really silly thing to do).

So, let’s see the “magic” method I’ve thought of. First you have to have access to your SQL database, with admin rights. Now let’s see the steps:

1. Create another WordPress blog (on a subdomain of the original blog, on shared hosting account or even on your local PC)
2. Create an account and set a password
3. Login to that blog’s SQL database (you can use PHP MyAdmin)
4. Browse the wp_users table and look for the user_pass field corresponding to the admin user. You won’t recognize the password you typed as it’s encrypted.
5. Copy the string
6. Login to the SQL database (usually your host provides access to PHP MyAdmin) of the blog you’ve lost the password
7. Browse the wp_users table and change the user_pass original field to the copied value at Step 5 (at this step you’ll also see the username/usernames accounts of the blog)
   
8. Go back to your blog and login with the username to which you’ve changed the password (use the clead password, not the encrypted string).

The wizard above can also be applied to any website that uses MySQL to store users and passwords, provided that you duplicate the platform (so that the passwords are encrypted the same way).

If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact me.

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