Your Home Wi-Fi: Blessings and Dangers

Going wireless is fantastic. I love it and enjoy the benefits that it provides. Do I want to enjoy the sun out in the backyard? My wireless netbook can still connect and I can still work. Is it a pain to try to string cable to the downstairs apartment to be able to stream media to the entertainment station there? Wireless is the answer. How do I get more out of my smartphone when I am at home? The answer, once again is the signal coming from my Wi-Fi router.

These are the miracles of our age, these little ways that we can stay connected to our friends, family and news and information sources. There’s no doubt that Wi-Fi is a great convenience, but it can make your home network more vulnerable if you’re not following a few simple steps.

Here are a couple of ways to keep your home network safer:

• Make sure you’re using your own password:
  • Every wireless router has a default password to get in and change the settings. If your first step in configuring the router wasn’t to change that password, you’re just making things easy for the bad guys (or your kids even, if they wanted to make sure that their network traffic got a higher priority than yours). Change that password, own your network.
• Update your router’s firmware:
  • Your Wi-Fi router, though it may just seem a piece of hardware to you, is really a hardware and software combination. And with any software, exploits are found that could allow intruders to force their way in through cracks in the software and hardware. The manufacturers find out about these vulnerabilities and update the firmware on their devices somewhat regularly. Make sure your router has the most recent firmware available. On most pieces of hardware it’s a quick and painless procedure.
• Use the strongest transmission encryption available, aim for WPA or WPA2:
  • Early on in Wi-Fi’s development, there wasn’t very advanced transmission between the router and the clients. Many networks ran in “Open” mode — that had no encryption point-to-point or at a light “WEP” encryption that could easily be cracked. Both of these modes could be easily sniffed by a malicious person with a computer set up to do so so that your data transmissions could be read and taken. Do you do banking on your home machine over the Wi-Fi in your house? If you’re using Open or WEP encryption modes, you could be exposing your passwords, bank, and account numbers.
  • While you’re in changing your password and updating your firmware anyway, won’t you use a stronger encryption method (WPA or WPA2 are best right now) with a nice, strong password to log into the network that you can share only with friends and family?

Some of these things can be a bit intimidating and technical, but by taking a look at these three points, you can go a long way towards making sure that a malicious intruder (or curious kid) aren’t going places in your home network that they shouldn’t.

If you have any questions or are curious about getting someone to help you with this, contact me. I’m happy to help you either over the phone, or if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, I make house calls.

Have you found any low-hanging fruit for Wi-Fi networks? Any places where someone could really make their network safer without a lot of extra work or bother to the people who use the network? Let us know in the comments.

Photo by Flickr user Florian and used with Creative Commons attribution, share-alike permission