Another big step in securing your home wireless network is not to announce that you have one. Public or corporate wireless networks may need to broadcast their existence so that new wireless devices can detect and connect to them. However, for your home, you are trying to prevent rogue wireless devices from detecting and connecting to your network.

The wireless router or access point has a Service Set Identifier (SSID). Basically, the SSID is the name of the wireless network. By default, wireless routers and access points will broadcast a beacon signal about every 1/10 of a second, which contains the SSID among other things. It is this beacon which wireless devices detect and which provides them with the information they need to connect to the network.

Your wireless network will most likely only have a handful of devices. Rather than relying on this beacon signal, you can simply manually enter the SSID and other pertinent information into each client to allow them to connect to your wireless network. Check the product manual that came with your wireless equipment to determine how to disable the broadcasting of the SSID.

Your device will come with a default SSID which is often simply the name of the manufacturer, such as Linksys or Netgear. Even with the SSID broadcasting turned off, it is important that you not use the default SSID.There are only a handful of manufacturers of home wireless equipment, so it wouldn’t take long to guess at the possible SSIDs if you leave it set for the default.Therefore, you need to change this, and preferably not to something equally easy to guess, like your last name.

Regardless of what protocol your wireless equipment uses, some basic steps should be taken to make sure other users are not able to connect to your wireless network and access your systems or hijack your Internet connection for their own use.

Change Default Username and Password
To begin with, change the username and password required to access the administrative and configuration screens for your wireless router. Most home wireless routers come with a Web-based administrative interface.The default IP address the device uses on the internal network is almost always 192.168.0.1. Finding out what the default username and password are for a given manufacturer is not difficult.The equipment usually comes configured with something like “admin” for the username, and “password” for the password. Even without any prior knowledge about the device or the manufacturer defaults, an attacker could just blindly guess the username and password in fewer than ten tries.With a default IP address and default administrative username and password, your wireless router can be hacked into even by novices.

Make sure you change the username to something that only you would think of. Just like renaming the Administrator account on your computer, you want to choose a username that won’t be just as easy to guess as “admin” or whatever the default username was.You also want to choose a strong password that won’t be easily guessed or cracked. Lastly, you should change the internal IP subnet if possible.The 192.168.x.x address range is for internal use only.A large percentage of those who use this address range use 192.168.0.x as their subnet, which makes it easy to guess. You can use any number from 0 to 254 for the third octet, so choose something like 192.168.71.x so potential attackers will have to work a little harder.

Remember, the goal is to make it difficult for attackers or malware to penetrate your system. Nothing you do will make your network 100-percent impenetrable to a dedicated and knowledgeable attacker. But, by putting various layers of defense in place such as complex passwords, personal firewalls, antivirus software, and other security measures, you can make it sufficiently hard enough that no casual attacker will want to bother.

A variety of wireless network protocols are currently in use.The most common equipment for home users now is to be either 802.11g or 802.11 pre-n and 802.11a/b equipment is going obsolete very soon.The most common protocol, particularly for home users, has been 802.11gb; however, 802.11 pre-n is becoming the default standard because of its increased speed and compatibility with existing 802.11 networks.The following is a brief overview of the different protocols:

802.11b
Wireless network equipment built on the 802.11b protocol was the first to really take off commercially. 802.11b offers transmission speeds up to 11 mbps, which compares favorably with standard Ethernet networks plus, the equipment is relatively cheap. One problem for this protocol is that it uses the unregulated 2.4GHz frequency range, which is also used by many other common household items such as cordless phones and baby monitors. Interference from other home electronics devices may degrade or prevent a wireless connection.

802.11a
The 802.11a protocol uses a regulated 5GHz frequency range, which is one contributing factor for why 802.11a wireless equipment is significantly more expensive than its counterparts. 802.11a offers the advantage of transmission speeds of up to 54 mbps; however, the increased speed comes with a much shorter range and more difficulty traversing obstructions, such as walls, due to the higher frequency range.

Read more »

Think about how a wireless network affects the security of your network and your computers. When you have a wired network, you have only one way in more or less. If you put a firewall on the network cable between your computers and the public Internet, your computers are shielded from most unauthorized access.The firewall acts as a traffic cop, limiting and restricting access into your network through that single access point. Now you throw a wireless device on your network. It doesn’t matter if it’s one computer with a wireless network adapter or a wireless router or access point, the results are the same: you are now broadcasting data through the air.Your “access point” is now all around you. Rather than a single point of access that can be easily protected, your access point is now three dimensional, all around you, at various ranges, from the next room to the house next door to the
roadside in front of your home.

Wireless equipment often boasts of ranges over 1,000 feet.The reality is that unless there are no obstructions, the temperature is above 75 and less than 78, the moon is in retrograde and it’s the third Tuesday of the month, the range will be more like 100 feet. But if your wireless data can make it the 75 feet from your wireless router in the basement to where you are checking your e-mail while watching a baseball game as you sit on the couch in your living room, it can also make it the 60 feet over to your neighbor’s house or the 45 feet out to the curb in front of your home. Although standard off-the-shelf equipment doesn’t generally have tremendous range, the wardrivers, a term used to describe actively scouting areas specifically looking for insecure wireless networks to connect to, have homegrown super antennas made with Pringles cans and common household items from their garage that can help them detect your wireless network from a much greater range.

Read more »

Continue from part 1

Installing the USB dongles was simple. They are smaller than your average thumb drive, so they are also unobtrusive. Installing the dongle and the drivers from the CD took less than 10 minutes. Once installed, the driver software installs a My Bluetooth Places icon to your desktop and a small icon in your system tray. Establishing connections to a Bluetooth device called pairing is as easy as running a setup wizard and typing the four-digit PIN for the device. (Different software drivers and Bluetooth devices work differently, of course, but in our experience most Bluetooth devices are similarly easy to install and configure.)

Up to seven “slave” devices can be simultaneously paired with a single “master,” with the master in this case being the PC. After a device is initially paired, establishing a connection between the master and slave is simple. In the case of Anycom’s software, for example, you can simply right-click the system tray icon to pull down a menu of devices and select the one to which you wish to connect.

Unfortunately, not every Bluetooth-enabled device supports all Bluetooth profiles, and it’s important to verify the profiles supported by your Bluetooth gadgets before purchasing an accessory. For example, Motorola RAZR V3m test phone supports HSP (Headset Profile), HFP, DUN (Dial-Up Networking Profile), OPP (Object Push Profile), and FTP (File Transfer Protocol), but does not support A2DP.

This was disappointing, given that one of the RAZR’s selling points is that it can double as a music player. We obstinately tried to make it connect to our Bluetooth speakers anyway, to which the RAZR responded with a “Device Not Supported” error message or something similar.

Read more »

Although Bluetooth may have been the sole province of the technologically elite a few years ago, it’s an increasingly popular standard for cellular phones and other computing devices. It’s probably safe to assume that it has become mainstream.

Bluetooth uses short-range radio frequencies to allow a variety of devices (personal digital assistants, cellular phones, mice, keyboards, printers, scanners, cameras, and music players, for example) to communicate with each other and transfer or share data.

As an evolving standard, Bluetooth still has plenty of room to grow, and new and improved capabilities are still being developed for it. Bluetooth is actually composed of many different profiles, different instruction sets that are used for a variety of functions. For example, the HFP (Hands-Free Profile) is the
Bluetooth profile that enables the phone calls via wireless headsets.

Bluetooth Meets Stereo Audio
A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile) is a Bluetooth profile that lets Bluetooth devices send and receive mono or stereo audio signals. In other words, it’s one more reason to throw on your wireless headset and tune out the world, because A2DP lets you listen to audio (Internet radio or MP3 files, for example) from a Bluetooth A2DP-compatible MP3 player, cell phone, or PC through a set of A2DP-compatible headphones or external speakers. Better still, you can listen to your music and pick up an incoming call without switching between headsets.

In other words, Bluetooth/A2DP gives you the freedom to listen to your music unfettered by wires. Of course, this might mean upgrading your cellular phone or buying a new Bluetooth headset.

Read more »

There are currently two mainstream wireless networking implementations: 802.11b and 802.11g. The first of these to achieve widespread acceptance was 802.11b, operating over the 2.4GHz frequency and capable of up to 11Mbps under ideal conditions. 802.11b can operate at distances up to 300 feet (indoors), though the transfer rate drops as the distance between devices increases. Although the 802.11b standard is a bit dated, for many users its transfer rate is perfectly suitable.

Although 802.11b routers and wireless cards are still commonplace, a newer standard, 802.11g, is rapidly supplanting it. The principal advantage of 802.11g over the 802.11b standard is a higher transfer rate; 802.11g can operate at speeds of up to 54Mbps. The downside to 802.11g is a shorter range: 802.11g can reach approximately 100 feet.

You can use a mix of 802.11b and 802.11g devices in a wireless network, but the speed of the network will drop down to the 802.11b standard. This allows you to upgrade an existing network without having to replace all of your wireless components in one fell swoop.

In addition to the two main wireless implementations, there are several additional ones that are either vendor customizations or standards that never achieved widespread adoption. Many of these will interoperate with the previously mentioned standards, but be sure to check with the vendor before purchasing.

Read more »