This video shows you how someone can hack your home or business wireless network in just a few minutes with freely available hacking tools found online.
Q. What can I do to secure my wireless network?
A. Wireless internet connections have made getting online easy.
Just go to the coffee shop and boom, you’re online. Even Starbucks converted their entire network to free wireless.
Today, people own a variety of wi-fi gadgets including PDA’s, Blackberries, Smartphones, game stations like the Wii and of course, the laptop.
So if you want setup a wireless network, what’s the minimum you need to know to keep your data safe?
1. Purchase your own wireless router
When you get internet service with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) like Comcast or Qwest, they provide you with a modem. This device connected to the cable or phone line and turns that signal into an internet connection. Now, often these “modems” wear two hats because they often are equipped to be routers as well. Routers do just that; route traffic. Routers protect your computer from the internet by looking at requests going in and out. It drops or denies what looks like bad traffic. On top of this, the modem could have a third job and offer wireless too. What so bad about this you ask? Why not just use the modem/router/wireless you got from your interent service provider?
These internet providers are out to make a profit from the services and products they provide so quality is often at the bottom of their list when they decide which devices to provide to their customers. If you have high speed internet, you’re probably familiar with power cycling your modem because it’s frozen and you can’t get online.
2. Secure your wireless with tough encryption
You can get a secure, tough password from Steve Gibson’s GRC website. Even the password page is SSL!
3. Password protect the administrator login
4. Only share necessary folders
Once you have a network up and running, check your shares. Plan out what you want to share, like the “My Documents” folder and only share that. A common security issue is that the entire C:/ drive will be shared with “everyone” so if someone is on your network, including your children’s friend who brought over his or her laptop, they can see everything on your computer including your Quickbooks, taxes, Excel and Word documents, PDF’s…you get the picture. I will post an article about how to view your shared files if you’re running Windows XP.
5. Get a Mac from the Apple Store
Enough said. Mac OSX can now run Windows XP. Two ways are through Parallels and Bootcamp. With so many applications hosted on the web, Microsoft is losing their foothold with applications running on the Windows platform. A great example is Google Docs.
Next Steps
Purchase a good router Linksys WRT54GL Wireless-G Router w/Free shipping at Amazon
Schedule an appointment with me to set it up - Wireless network setup
0 comments ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below..
Leave a Comment