How to Secure Your Wireless

If you have a home wireless you want to make sure that you secure it well. If someone has access to your wireless they are able to gain valuable information about you and your personal life. Not only that but they can use your internet connection to do things that are illegal like copy right infringement which may come back and bit you.

There are some simple guidelines that you can follow which will make it almost impossible for someone to crack your wireless.

First thing you can do have your wireless router set to open or WEP encryption. Both of these will leave you open the first being that it has no protection. The second is that it is severely weak (meaning anyone that can push a button can get in within a min).
Cracking WEP
So what is left if not leaving the router open and encrypting it with WEP? Well the only other choice is to WPA or WPA2 both of these encryption for your wireless is a lot more secure and has not been compromised like WEP has been.

But that alone is not enough the beautiful thing about wireless routers and computers is once you enter the password on the computer you don't have to remember it or enter it in all the time so you can help make your router more secure by making it very complex. don't ever use a wood or a phone number as the password.
I personally would suggest having a 25 character password that is alphanumerical with a few symbols in it. A sight like this will help
http://www.thebitmill.com/tools/password.html

next thing you can do is not use a common SSID. A SSID is what your router identifies itself as to the rest of the world. So your netgear or linksys that you see on your computer is someone that just left their wifi SSID as the default for the router. There have been hackers out there that have made rainbow tables of the most common SSID names so that people can easily rack into them.
http://www.renderlab.net/projects/WPA-tables/

Use something different like a street name of your street and maybe add a number to it. The whole point of not using a common SSID name is with WPA it uses the SSID to salt the hash of the password making each SSID have a different hash for the same password. This makes it a lot harder for someone that wants to crack your wireless password. Using programs like pyrit.
Cracking with Pyrit

Though if you don't care about securing your wireless you may just be helping another family out or a kid that wants to look at porn not on his dads wireless.

thanks for reading,
Local Tech Repair Admin

Have any other advice or have a question leave a comment.



*update*
You should also turn off WPS if you can. There is a major flaw in the design that causes wpa to be cracked easily.