Ryan Leland

Basic Wireless Security Guide

Wardriving

This usually involves people parking outside of a house, and trying to get on to a wireless network to release a virus, or try and scan your wireless traffic for anything interesting. The chances of this are pretty low if you’re in a residential neighborhood, but it’s a pretty real issue if you live in an apartment.

802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g

Those are just languages that the wireless cards, and routers use to connect and communicate. the “a” version is faster than “b”, and “g” is for the most part the same as “a” with the exception that it has better signal strength.

Basic Wireless Network Security Measures

When your computer is connected to a network, it’s given a network address. Routers are also assigned these addresses. Problem is many router manufacturers give by default the same address to their routers (usually 192.168.0.1). Since this address is so common, it’s usually a good idea to change it. Also the default password to access the control panel of the router is usually by default always something like “password”, or “admin”. It is a good idea to change that as well.Another issue is the SSID. This is the broadcast signal that routers send out that tells computers that the router exists. Once you have successfully connected to a router with your computer, you can shut off this signal to make it harder for people to detect your wireless network.

Use Encryption in Your Wireless Network

There a few means to encrypt your network data using a key, so that only your router and computers can read that data. The encryption pretty much just scrambles the data based on a password(key) that you set on the router, but you also have to enter the same password(key) on each computer on that network.In general the longer the key/password you use in the encryption set-up, the more secure your data is.