Wi-Fi Security Made Easy

A comment on my Wi-Fi dropouts post requested help in configuring security on a wireless router. I'm happy to oblige. Here are my suggestions for securing your wireless network, from most important to least. I'd love to show you exactly how to make all these changes, but unfortunately every router is different, even routers made by the same company can have wildly different management schemes. Consult your user manual for detailed instructions.

• Change the administrator password. All routers ship with default passwords for the management account, and these are common knowledge on the Internet. Your first step should always be to change the admin password to something unique.
• Turn on encryption. No wireless encryption method is perfect, but some is better than none. Without encryption, anyone in the neighborhood can hop on your network, and you probably don't want that. If all the devices you own support WPA, use it (WPA-PSK is the type you want, if that's an option). Otherwise, use 128-bit WEP, which you might have to use if you have older networking products around your office.
• Change the name of your network. Many people never change the generic network names like "belkin" and "linksys," and not only will you have trouble identifying which network is yours, you're also telling the world your network may be in a default state and vulnerable to hacking.

Now we're getting into more advanced stuff. These are changes that only the security-paranoid need to consider. More casual users can stick with just those above.

• Turn off SSID broadcasting. When you scan for networks in Windows, you get a nice list of networks because they are all broadcasting their SSID, a network ID code. If you don't want your network to show up in this list, turn off SSID broadcasting. The downside: You'll have to type in the network name manually when you first connect to it.
• Turn on MAC filtering. A MAC is a unique code that every piece of network hardware has. You can set your router to only accept connections from devices with MACs that you allow. Just input the MAC address for your various PCs and other devices, and anything not on the guest list will be escorted to the door. Note that if you're not comfortable with hexadecimal and the inner workings of networking, this tip may be more trouble for you than it's worth.