Extra steps to securing your Wireless Network

Setting up the encryption on your Wireless Network is the first and most important step in network security. There are however more things you can do to add even more security to your network.

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Once you have setup the encryption on your wireless network the most important stage of security has been done. There are plenty of other steps that can be taken to increase the security of your wireless network even further. Simple steps can make all the difference.

All of your wireless equipment comes with factory default settings. These include usernames passwords and the SSID (Service Set IDentifier) for your wireless network. It is essential that you change all of these to your own personal settings. Anything left on factory default can be used as a opportunity of a attack to your network by hackers who will know about the default settings for most hardware.

As a side note I have been in places where many wireless networks with default SSID's are popping up as the wireless network names. The first thing that comes to mind is that the people operating these networks do not know a lot about them otherwise they will have changed this straight away. Looking at it this way which network will a hacker try and access first?

Hopefully your username and password will have been changed when you installed the software for your wireless router or access point. Decent software should prompt you to change these settings when you first install it. The last thing you want is Username : Admin, Password : Admin.

A little trick that is not used as often as it should be. Your Wireless router or Access point transmits your SSID and network name on a frequent basis so that computers that are in range can see your network and know that its there. It will appear in the available networks section on the computers in range of the signal. If you only want the computers that you know about to access your network and strictly no-one else (not even visitors with a laptop) then you can tell your Wireless access point to stop broadcasting the SSID. Your network will no longer appear in the available networks list and only computers that have been preset with your networks SSID will be able to see it and connect to it.

Even if you do broadcast your SSID though the computer will still need the password to access it. You will want to weigh up the difference between ease of use and the added bit of security it brings. You should find this setting in your wireless router or access points admin panel under the description of Disable SSID broadcasts.

The DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is a protocol that automates the configuration of computers that use TCP/IP. the DHCP server provides the computers that connect to the network with an IP address dynamically and recognises which IP has been assigned to which computer. By turning this protocol off, all of the computers on the network will have to have there IP addresses manually setup. Providing you are reasonably competent at computing this shouldn't be a problem. You will need to check your Admin panel again to check the range of IP address that you can set the computers to use. Providing each computer is in the range and they all have a different address everything should work fine. You may well be able to set the IP address range yourself in the admin panel.

My turning of DHCP you make sure that any intruder will not only have to have the correct password to access your network but also will have to have a valid IP address and won't be assigned one should they gain access to the wireless network.