First Step To Secure Your Home Wireless Network
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.
