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Yikes! My Wireless Network is Unsecured!?! |
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The convenience of wireless networks is amazing - how wonderful to take the laptop out on the back deck, and work away while enjoying the great outdoors! Home wireless networks are becoming so common that in almost any residential neighbourhood, you can fire up your laptop and it will detect a handful of them. Amazingly, any time you do this, you'll find at least one or two networks that are unsecured. Why? Because it's easy to go out and buy a wireless router, plug it in, and connect to it without changing any of the default settings. Unfortunately, the default settings for wireless routers are available to the world from the manufacturers' websites, so their passwords are common knowledge. That means that your neighbours (or worse, hackers) can park on your street and access your wireless network - or even take it over and lock you out! The good news is that it's not too late to fix this, even if your router settings have been changed and you can't access them any more. Routers can be reset to their factory defaults by performing a hard reset (this usually involves a sequence of pressing the reset button on the router itself and restarting - check your router's documentation). When your router is using factory defaults, you can access its settings by typing the router's IP Address into the Address field in your Internet browser. The IP address is a series of numbers separated by dots, like 192.168.1.1. Your router's documentation will tell you the correct address to use. Once you've connected to your router, there are two things that you should change to give you a bare minimum level of security: the password, and the SSID (Service Set Identifier). You'll find that these can easily be changed once you've connected to the router. The more often you change these, the harder it is for someone else to take over your network. If you want more than just the bare minimum of security, you should also consider specifying which computers are allowed to connect to your network (MAC Address Filtering), and setting up an encryption system. Ironically, all computers, including Windows PC's, have a MAC address that is an individual identifier, like a fingerprint. MAC stands for Media Access Control, not Mac Computers! You can tell your network to only accept connections from computers with a certain "fingerprint". The encryption and MAC address filtering may sound complicated, but they're actually quite easy to implement just by following the instructions in the router setup screens. To get more information about these and other security measures, click on the Help feature in your router configuration screen. If you're looking for a good basic overview of wireless network security, go to the Linksys website's Learning Centre. By: Diane Henders, Bright Ideas Personalized Learning Inc. For more information or computer training services, please call Bright Ideas Personalized Learning at (403) 692-2255. |
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