Five steps to secure your home network, secure your router
Today, most if not all of us have a wireless home network, and if we live in an urban area, the airwaves are crowded and we not only see our own network, but those of many of our neighbors. Is your router secure? Would you know if it was? Let’s go over some basics to make sure it is secure and remove all doubt. When you take your router out of the box, while it is ready to go and will operate moments after you plug the power and modem signal into the device, it is not yet configured to provide you and your family a secure connectivity to the internet.
Home network router configuration:
Userid & Password: One of the first questions to be asked in the configuration menu concerns administrative access to the router. Many routers come from the manufacturer with an account named “Admin” and a password of “password,” not exactly the most secure configuration. Change that immediately to something unique. When you create your password, ensure it is a strong password – Greater than 10 characters, containing a letter, number & symbol and is not a word in any language’s dictionary).
WPA2 encryption: Enable WPA2 encryption and create another strong password (letter, number & symbol, not a word in a dictionary) for your network. If your router does not support WPA2 encryption, upgrade that router.
MAC Filtering: The new routers allow MAC address filtering. You are able to identity the MAC address of your various wireless devices and limit access to your network to those devices. Every computer, smart-phone, tablet, smart-tv, etc. has a unique MAC address. Ensure your adding a device to your network requires your administrative approval.
Guest Network: If your router has the option to create a guest network, do so. This keeps your guests out of your network and if their device is compromised or infected, they are not inside your home network. If you do give your network password to a visitor, say a house guest, change the password, when they depart.
SSID: And don’t forget to configure your router so that your SSID (Service Set Identifier) is suppressed. In this manner, individuals who are in wireless proximity (your neighbors for example) are not seeing your network, unless they know the name. Also, in naming your network, try and select a name that does not associate the network directly to you.
When in doubt, read the user manual and visit the website of the router manufacturer for directions on how to configure your network router.
And for additional perspective, see this piece from the TODAY show “Is your Wi-Fi connection safe” – though produced a few years ago, still apropos today.
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