Wireless Networking Security - Secure Your Network

Wireless networking security is a hot topic today. The opportunity for someone Wardriving and connecting to your wireless network router is a serious security concern. If they were to successfully connect to your network they would have the opportunity to monitor all your traffic, capture account and password information, drop viruses or worms onto your network or the internet that could be tracked back to your internet protocol (IP) address. They also might conduct illegal activities that again could be traced back to your IP address. Even with wired networks there is still the possibility for someone to connect a rouge wireless access point to your network and provide a hacker easy access to your wired network. To minimize these security risks you need to monitor your network and implement good wireless network policies. You should at a minimum change the default administrator account name from admin to a unique name, such as, Router Number 100. Also you need to change the default password to a strong password that cannot be easily guessed (I have a YouTube video that discusses the need for using stronger passwords). The encryption should be turned on and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WAP) selected if possible. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is easily cracked within minutes using software found on the Internet. You should also turn off the Service Set Identifier (SSID) broadcast that announce to the world you access point is available. This will prevent the casual connection to your wireless network. You will have to manually set the SSID in each computer that connects to your network. To help further strengthen wireless security you could use Media Access Control (MAC) filtering. You would need to set each authorized MAC address in your router. You could also consider turning off Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and using static IP addressing. You would have to manually set IP addresses for each computer to connect to the network. You might also consider scanning the area for conflicting channels and if a conflict is discovered you should select a non-overlapping channel of either 1,6 or 11.

YouTube video: The Need for Stronger Passwords

YouTube video: Using Netstumbler for Locating Wireless Access Points

If you cannot implement WAP encryption you should consider some of the other security measures mentioned here to help strengthen your wireless networking security.