Four Ways To Protect Your Wifi
No network security is perfect, but by following these four simple steps to protecting your home or office WiFi network, you can make it so difficult for would-be hackers that you can rest easy knowing no one is likely on your network.Here’s four paths to better network security.
1. Choose the right type of encryption.
Modern “WiFi Certified” equipment produced in 2006 or later requires Wifi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) or greater level of encryption. The much older WEP standard is no longer used, with the best consumer-grade encryption tech using WPA2-PSK standard. WPA2-PSK gives 256-bit encryption by the use of between 8 and 63 printable ASCII characters, or up to 64 hexadecimal digits.
2. Choose a strong password.
You might be tempted to choose a short and easy-to-remember password for your WiFi network, but this is a mistake. Using WPA2-PSK will require at least 8 characters, which brings a reasonably strong level of protection. However, using more characters chosen from a random mix of letters and numbers will bring much stronger protection. It’s probably not necessary to use a full 64 characters for your home network, as this would be difficult to type in on mobile phones or other new-to-the-network devices.
3. Require adding of MAC Addresses.
Each computer and mobile device’s hardware contains a unique Media Access Control (MAC) address. This number does not change, and is used to identify the device among all of those on a network, or multiple networks. Some routers and network management software allows the system administrator to manually add the only devices she will allow to connect to the network. A device will be unable to connect without its MAC address registered in the system.
Choosing this method does carry the drawback of requiring someone with access to the router be present any time a machine wants to connect to the network. However, its upside is a much higher level of encryption than a WPA2 key alone.
4. Consider using wired access.
Finally, know that regardless of how strong a network’s encryption and what reasonable steps you take to protect it, no network’s security is perfect. For extremely sensitive data, you might want to consider abandoning WiFi altogether. By connecting each device together through a wired Local Area Network (LAN), you can avoid any attempt to crack the network that does not have physical access to its components.
