Protect Your Home Wireless Network All Versions
Public wireless hot spots aren’t the only ones that present a theoretical security risk; your wireless network at home harbors hacker potential, too. It’s theoretically possible (barely) for so-called war drivers (people who drive around with laptops, looking for unprotected home WiFi networks) to piggyback onto home networks to download child pornography or send out spam. This one’s easy to nip in the bud: •• Turn on wireless encryption. When you first set up your WiFi router (your base station or access point), you’re offered the chance to create a password for your network. Take the chance. (Modern wireless routers offer two different types of password-protected encryption, called WEP and WPA. If it’s available, choose the more modern, more secure one, which is WPA.) You then have to enter the password when you first connect to that hot spot from each wireless PC on your network. Note: You won’t have to type this password every time you want to get onto your own network! Windows offers to memorize it for you.
•• Ban unwanted PCs. Many routers include a feature that lets you limit network access to specific computers. Any PC that’s not on the list won’t be allowed in. The feature is called MAC address filtering, although it has nothing to do with Macintosh computers. (A Media Access Control address is a serial number that uniquely identifies a piece of networking hardware.) Not all routers can do this, and how you do it varies from router to router, so check the documentation. In a typical Linksys router, for example, you log into the router’s administrator’s screen using your Web browser, and then select WirelessÆWireless Network Access. On the screen full of empty boxes, type the MAC address of the PC that you want to be allowed to get onto the network. Tip: To find out the MAC address of a PC, press w+R to open the Run dialog box, type ipconfig /all, and press Enter. In the resulting info screen, look for the Physical Address entry. That’s the MAC address.
Type all the MAC addresses into the boxes on the Linksys router, click Save Settings, and you’re all done. •• Place your router properly. Placing your WiFi router centrally in the house minimizes the “leaking” of the signal into the surrounding neighborhood.