How Do I Secure My Home Wireless Network
Wireless networks are out there everywhere these days, especially in people’s homes. However, it is important that you take the time to secure it or you are offering an open invitation for someone to access your information. It is easier than you might think to secure your home wireless network. Then you can use it and have peace of mind that you aren’t going to be compromising anything that someone else can benefit from.
Most of us use the internet at home for work and for fun. More than 70% of users also buy items online with their personal information being entered to do so. While this is very convenient you also risk someone being able to steal your bank account number or your credit card number. When you have a secure wireless network in place though you make it much harder for that to occur.
Even if you only pay bills online that account information can be used to open up other accounts in your name. So many people out there have become the victims of identity theft this way. More criminals find that they can hide behind such internet crimes too and the risk of ever being caught is much less than when they do crimes in person. They don’t need complex tools to did it either, just a WIFI card and time to search for those unsecured networks out there.
Make sure all of the information you use online is encrypted. Encryption is a type of coding that changes what is really there. That way someone attempted to hack into your system won’t see all of the data that you actually have accessed or entered into your computer. When you first get your wireless network in place you will be assigned a password. You will need to go into the settings area on your router, in this area you can set the encryption key. Lookout for something called WEP key as you can use this to help protect your network. This is normally easy to configure, you should notice something called SSID which is basically your network ID you’ll need to keep note of this so you know exactly what this is called. Make sure and then to set a good password a good combination of letters and numbers that aren’t easy to figure out is the best type of set up to go with. The last thing you we need is some hacker to be able to crack this password easily and being able to gain access to your wlan.
Make sure the access passwords to your different online accounts isn’t the same for all of them. Should one of them get compromised you will stand to have a lesser problem then if that gives someone free access to everything you work with. Be wary too of having automated password savings on sites. Sure, it can be faster than typing them in but you are increasing your risk of someone gaining access to that information.
Taking these small but effective steps to secure your home wireless network is important. Make sure you keep up on new technology that comes along too so that you can update your security accordingly. Signing up for newsletters so that you get such information automatically emailed to you is a great way to make sure you don’t forget about this part of using a computer at home for personal use.
No matter what type of operating system you use it or this is a Mac or Windows XP/Vista there is software available that can help you monitor routers and keep track of packets that are connecting to your devices. To be honest you would probably need a lot of experience in the security end to really understand this. These types of applications can easily install on laptop computers so you can check to see if your networking information is being accessed by an intruder. Hopefully you will never need to go down this road as he set the information and applications are available if you ever need to.
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