Wireless Networking Precautions

          In a study done in December of 2004, sixty to seventy percent of all wireless networks are insecure.  If you have an unsecured wireless network in your home, anyone in close proximity can spy on your online activities.  Sometimes, someone could even gain full access to your computer's hard drive over an unsecured wireless network.  Neighbors can also mooch off your Internet connections.  This would not only deprive you of bandwidth that you are paying for, but if your neighbor conducted illegal activity while online, it could be traced back to your network.  There are very big odds for neighbors or the people around you hacking into your computer.  You should take the right precautions for making sure your network is secure.

          The first step to take for making your wireless network secure is to use encryption.  This is the most the most important thing you can do to secure your wireless network.  Almost every wireless access point has some type of encryption mechanism built in.  Use a WPA encryption because the WEP encryption can be deciphered if the person captures enough data. If your wireless hardware does not support WPA, either upgrade the hardware or turn on the WEP encryption.  The downside to using encryption is that it can be complicated to set up.  Another step you can take to set up a secure wireless connection is to not announce yourself.  Wi-Fi access points use an identifier broadcaster to announce themselves.  You already know you have a wireless network, so there is no need to announce yourself.  If your wireless access point allows you to disable the identifier broadcaster, do so. You should also change your SSID or ESSID which is basically a name that is assigned to the wireless access point.  It is important to change this because you don't want your access point to have an out of the box name.  You should also change the access point's default password.  One other thing you can do to help secure your wireless access point is to limit which computers are allowed to use it.  Every network interface card comes with a MAC address.  Most wireless access points contain a mechanism that you can use to tell the access point that only network cards with these specific MAC addresses are allowed to use the network.  Make sure to secure your wireless network. The last thing you want is for a hacker to break into your computer and spy on what your doing.

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