A 5-Minute Guide to Wireless Network Security for Home
Posted on November 4, 2005, under Web Dev/Tech.
The 5-Minute Wireless Network Security for your Home guide will show you different steps to take to make your wireless network a little harder to tap into by your neighbor or someone wardriving your street.
I recently got a new ThinkPad at work with a pretty powerful wireless adapater. I brought it home, and realized there were 3 other wireless networks in my neighborhood my old wireless card had never picked up! One of them was encrypted, but two of them weren’t. I had assumed mine was the only wireless network in the area, but I’m glad I took steps to secure my network just in case!
The guide shows how-to examples for the Linksys WRT54G wireless router, but it is written so as to be a guide for any modern (or even not so modern) wireless router. The steps are pretty practical, and are very similar to steps I had already taken on my network.
The only thing I might mention has to do with the part on MAC address filtering in the advanced section. The article mentions collecting the MAC addresses for your network cards by hand, however my router captures this information automatically. You might see if your router will help you capture MAC addresses before you run off with a pencil and scratch paper trying to scribble down a bunch of random numbers and letters.
