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.

[tags]Change the SSID[/tags]