Not long ago, one of my colleagues told me a story which was quite funny. He was at home, and one of his neighbours, called him. He asked if he was having problems with his internet connection. My colleague told him, that everything was working for him, and that the only change he had done was changing the router's password. The other guy, asked him for the password, as he was unable to connect. After a quite funny conversation between them, my colleague learned that this guy had been using his Wifi connection for a long time, and more or less, he felt he had the right to use it, and blamed him for changing the password, preventing him from doing so.
I was amazed with this story, so I decided to write a small guide.
Tips on securing a Wifi network
1.- Change the default password, it is amazing the number of devices which are still protected with the password provided on the manual, or something like, admin, administrator, password, etc, etc.
2.- Use encription WEP/WPA, something is better than nothing, although we know that this encription(WEP) sistem can't stop an attack for more than 5 minutes, at least, you make it harder.
3.- Hide your network, You can change the default SSID.
4.- Disable SSID broadcasting. This feature allows new devices to automatically detect network settings. It is always harder to find something that it is not yelling "Hey, Crack me!!". Are you sure you want anyone who passes by to link to your access point?
5.- If you want more protection you can enable MAC filtering. On a home lan, usually you don't have many devices, so you can manually configure them, and no other devices will be able to connect to the router.
6.- You can also limit the number of devices connected to the network, but be careful, if your neighbour is an early bird, you will be banned from your own lan 😀
7.- Disable DHCP. If you know how to manually configure the parameters, new devices will have to be manually configured, and as we have said before, that makes things harder.
8.- Change passwords from time to time, if someone is using your network, and finds that you this regularly, he may choose to hack somewhere else.
9.- Switch off the access point when you are not using it. Ok, that never happens, that's why you bought it. But this really works against war-driving.
I forgot something, what happened to the guys on the story?…Well, they reached an agreement, and the neighbourg started paying for the use of the connection. How much? Strange as it may sound, he used fresh fruits. 5 Kg of oranges each week. He grew them, and were quite good. I know, I tasted them.
But be careful, if something goes wrong, you as the access point's owner, will be responsible.