5 Easy Way to Maximizing Your Home Wireless Security
Security experts will all tell you the same thing: Nothing is guaranteed. No technology is secure by itself. An unfortunate axiom is that building the better mousetrap can often create a better mouse. This is why, in the examples below, your implementation and administration of network security measures is the key to maximizing wireless security.
No preventative measure will guarantee network security but it will make it more difficult for someone to hack into your network. Often, hackers are looking for an easy target. Making your network less attractive to hackers, by making it harder for them to get in, will make them look elsewhere.
How do you do this? Before discussing WEP and WPA, let's look at a few security measures often overlooked.
1) Network Content Now that you know the risks assumed when networking wirelessly, you should view wireless networks as you would the Internet. Don't host any systems or provide access to data on a wireless network that you wouldn't put on the Internet.
2) Network Layout When you first lay out your network, keep in mind where your wireless PCs are going to be located and try to position your access point(s) towards the center of thatnetwork radius. Remember that access points transmit indiscriminately in a radius; placing an access point at the edge of the physical network area reduces network performance and leaves an opening for any hacker smart enough to discover where the access point is transmitting.
This is an invitation for a man-in-the-middle attack.To perform this type of attack, the hacker has to be physically close to your network. So, monitoring both your network and your property is important. Furthermore, if you are suspicious of unauthorized network traffic, most wireless products come with a log function, with which you can view activity on your network and verify if any unauthorized users have had access.
3) Network Devices With every wireless networking device you use, keep in mind that network settings (SSID, WEP keys, etc.) are stored in its firmware. If they get into the hands of a hacker, so do all of your settings. So keep an eye on them.
4) Administrator passwords Your network administrator is the only person who can change network settings. If a hacker gets a hold of the administrator's password, he, too, can change those settings. So, make it harder for a hacker to get that information. Change the administrator's password regularly.
5) SSID There are a few things you can do to make your SSID more secure: a. Disable Broadcast b. Make it unique c. Change it often Most wireless networking devices will give you the option of broadcasting the SSID. This is a option for convenience, allowing anyone to log into your wireless network. In this case, however, anyone includes hackers. So don't broadcast the SSID. A default SSID is set on your wireless devices by the factory. (The Linksys default SSID is "linksys".) Hackers know these defaults and can check these against your network. Change your SSID to something unique and not something related to your company or the networking products you use. Changing your SSID regularly will force any hacker attempting to gain access to your wireless network to start looking for that new SSID. With these three steps in mind, please remember thatwhile SSIDs are good for segmenting networks, they fall short with regards to security. Hackers can usually find them quite easily.
6) MAC addresses Enable MAC address filtering if your wireless products allow it. MAC address filtering will allow you to provide access to only those wireless nodes with certain MAC addresses. This makes it harder for a hacker using a random MAC address or spoofing (faking) a MAC address.
7) Firewalls Once a hacker has broken into your wireless network, if it is connected to your wired network, they'll have access to that, too. This means that the hacker has effectively used your wireless network as a backdoor through your firewall, which you've put in place to protect yournetwork from just this kind of attack via the Internet. You can use the same firewall technology to protect your wired network from hackers coming in through your wireless network as you did for the Internet. Rather than connecting your access point to an unprotected switch, swap those out for a router with a built-in firewall. The router will show the access point coming in through its WAN port and its firewall will protect your network from any transmissions entering via your wireless network.
PCs unprotected by a firewall router should at least run firewall software, and all PCs should run up-to-date antiviral software.
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Wireless Security Basic Guide Top 5 Don’ts In Wireless Security 10-Minutes Guide to Wireless Security














