5 Tips to Secure Your Wireless Router
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Wi-Fi routers can give you enough headaches without worrying if someone is leeching off your connection. You pay for that bandwidth you receive every month, and with so many movies to stream, games to play, and work to remotely connect to, you don't want to share your Internet pipe.
Not only can having others access your router slow down your connection, but there is the possibility they might get you into some legal entanglements. An incident made news least year in which a man was falsely arrested in child pornography charges. The guilty party was actually a neighboring bandwidth parasite neighbor using the innocent man's connection to download the odious content.
While a false arrest is an extreme case, having unauthorized users can cause performance issues and pose a security risk. Here are a few ways to keep leeches off your router.
Password encryption should be well-known to anyone with a wireless router. Never leave your router open without a password, and there are very few reasons for the average home and small business user to not encrypt wireless signal with WPA2 security.
Turn off broadcasting is a feature available in just about all routers. For example, you name your network "Jane's Wi-Fi." You know what the wireless name is (also called SSID), so you can easily enter the SSID into any devices you want to access that network. Other people, however, do not need to know the SSID. To prevent outsiders from seeing your network's name turn off broadcasting in your router's settings. This capability is typically found within the wireless router settings page in the router's management software. In the below image the "Enable SSID Broadcast" option would be unchecked, so that your network's name does not show up in other people's wireless network scans.
Disable Guest networks because lots of router now ship with an extra wireless network configured for guests to access your router. A guest network lets guests share your Internet connection without giving them access to shared files and devices on your private network. Guest networking is often used by businesses to provide customers courtesy access, but I recommend home users turn it off. Guest network passwords are sometimes configured with no security, or default passwords that anyone can easily look up on Google if they know the kind of router you have. If you are friend enough that I give you permission to share my router, you are friend enough to know my passphrase key.
MAC Filtering is a feature also found in most routers. You add the MAC address (a unique identifier for that unit) of any device you want to give access to the router into the filtering list. Any device not on the list that tries to get on will be blocked from accessing.
Get a network monitoring app such as Fing which will scan your network and provide information that you can use to see if you have any unwanted users or devices on your network. Fing will perform a discovery on your network and report information such as hostnames, IP addresses, MAC addresses, and more. If there is any information you don't recognize, you can investigate and found out if someone or something is on your network that shouldn't be.
Not only can having others access your router slow down your connection, but there is the possibility they might get you into some legal entanglements. An incident made news least year in which a man was falsely arrested in child pornography charges. The guilty party was actually a neighboring bandwidth parasite neighbor using the innocent man's connection to download the odious content.
While a false arrest is an extreme case, having unauthorized users can cause performance issues and pose a security risk. Here are a few ways to keep leeches off your router.
Password encryption should be well-known to anyone with a wireless router. Never leave your router open without a password, and there are very few reasons for the average home and small business user to not encrypt wireless signal with WPA2 security.
Turn off broadcasting is a feature available in just about all routers. For example, you name your network "Jane's Wi-Fi." You know what the wireless name is (also called SSID), so you can easily enter the SSID into any devices you want to access that network. Other people, however, do not need to know the SSID. To prevent outsiders from seeing your network's name turn off broadcasting in your router's settings. This capability is typically found within the wireless router settings page in the router's management software. In the below image the "Enable SSID Broadcast" option would be unchecked, so that your network's name does not show up in other people's wireless network scans.
Disable Guest networks because lots of router now ship with an extra wireless network configured for guests to access your router. A guest network lets guests share your Internet connection without giving them access to shared files and devices on your private network. Guest networking is often used by businesses to provide customers courtesy access, but I recommend home users turn it off. Guest network passwords are sometimes configured with no security, or default passwords that anyone can easily look up on Google if they know the kind of router you have. If you are friend enough that I give you permission to share my router, you are friend enough to know my passphrase key.
MAC Filtering is a feature also found in most routers. You add the MAC address (a unique identifier for that unit) of any device you want to give access to the router into the filtering list. Any device not on the list that tries to get on will be blocked from accessing.
Get a network monitoring app such as Fing which will scan your network and provide information that you can use to see if you have any unwanted users or devices on your network. Fing will perform a discovery on your network and report information such as hostnames, IP addresses, MAC addresses, and more. If there is any information you don't recognize, you can investigate and found out if someone or something is on your network that shouldn't be.
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