One thing I see all the time is that people do not secure their wireless networks. This is great if you want to share your internet with your neighbors, lose some of your speed, make it easier to be hacked into, or make any online crimes they commit traceable back to you. You get the point, it is better to just secure your wireless than the other alternatives. I don’t know why people don’t secure it, but it is either because they don’t know how or they don’t want to take the time. So, if you don’t know how I will tell you, and if you don’t want to take the time, then you probably won’t read the rest of this. The first thing to do is to turn your security on, this is done by going to the settings page for your router using your browser, my address for this is 192.168.2.1, this can vary a lot so check your manual. After putting that address in the address bar and pressing enter you should get a settings page. You may be prompted for a password before you get to the settings or when you try to change something. If you never see this you should set the password, or you may have to use the default, that you should change, refer to your manual. This is not as important as the wireless encryption because they are already on you network if they can access your router, but still turn it on. Once in the settings look for security settings, this will vary by router, check your manual if you can’t find it. Turn on and set the password for the encryption you choose, don’t choose WEP it is easily hackable by someone that knows what they are doing. Use some form of WPA. Now apply the settings and connect to your wireless using your password, that’s it for the main part. Now if you want it to be really secure I will tell you some things to do, this is getting more complicated and less necessary so I am just going to point you in the right direction. One thing to do is disable you router broadcasting your SSID. This is what you see as the name of the router you are connecting to. When you disable this it make it hard and impossible for the average person to even try to connect to your network because they can’t even see it’s name. They will need to know it’s name first. Also change it from the default, there are already too many linksys networks that they can guess yours or whatever brand you are using. The next thing to do is enable MAC address filtering that makes it so only computers with a MAC address that has been allowed can connect to your network. Every computer has it’s own MAC address. MAC addresses can be spoofed, but they would still need to know yours before they can spoof it. Now your wireless is very well locked down, maybe to well locked down. You most likely will not need it to be this secure because just turning on encryption will stop most people. Now that your security is on the edge of making you look paranoid, go, feel proud of knowing your are in control of your network.
