1. Install a Firewall A firewall helps protect your PC by preventing
unauthorized users from gaining access to your computer through the
Internet or a network. It acts as a barrier that checks any information
coming from the Internet or a network, and then either blocks the
information or allows it to pass through to your computer.
2. Change the Administrative Password on your Wireless Routers Each
manufacturer ships their wireless routers with a default password for easy
initial access. These passwords are easy to find on vendor support sites, and
should therefore be changed immediately.
3. Change the Default SSID Name and Turn Off SSID Broadcasting This will
require your wireless client computers to manually enter the name of your
SSID (Service Set Identifier) before they can connect to your network,
greatly minimizing the damage from the casual user whose laptop is
configured to connect to any available SSID broadcast it finds. You should
also change the SSID name from the factory default, since these are just as
well-known as the default passwords
4. Disable DHCP For a SOHO network with only a few computers, consider
disabling DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) on your router and
assigning IP addresses to your client computers manually. On newer wireless
routers, you can even restrict access to the router to specific MAC
addresses.
5. Replace WEP with WPA WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) is a security
protocol that was designed to provide a wireless computer network with a
level of security and privacy comparable to what is usually expected of a
wired computer network. WEP is a very weak form of security that uses
common 60 or 108 bit key shared among all of the devices on the network
to encrypt the wireless data. Hackers can access tools freely available on the
Internet that can crack a WEP key in as little as 15 minutes. Once the WEP
key is cracked, the network traffic instantly turns into clear text – making it
easy for the hacker to treat the network like any open network. WPA (Wi-Fi
Protected Access) is a powerful, standards-based, interoperable security
technology for wireless computer networks. It provides strong data
protection by using 128-bit encryption keys and dynamic session keys to
ensure a wireless computer network's privacy and security. Many
cryptographers are confident that WPA addresses all the known attacks on
WEP. It also adds strong user authentication, which was absent in WEP.
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