5 Tips For Securing Your Home Wi-Fi Network?

As wireless devices become more common, the need for wireless security continues to increase. Manufacturers of wireless devices are doing what they can to make them secure, but the rest is up to the users. These 5 tips will help to ensure your privacy and safety.

This is something that should be done as soon as the router is connected. Hackers make sure to know the default usernames and passWords of routers, so make sure to chance yours immediately. A strong passWord including letters and numbers is recommended.

By default, many routers come with no encryption enabled, meaning anyone can connect to your network. Check your router's manual for directions on enabling encryption. Whenever possible, use WPA encryption instead of WEP encryption, as it is stronger.

Make sure that the firewalls on both your computers and the router are enabled. Most of the time new routers come with the firewall enabled by default, but make sure to check that yours is running.

SSID broadcasting allows any compatible wireless device to see that your wireless network is up and running. Turning broadcasting off will prevent this by requiring you to know the name of the network you wish to connect to. Going a step further and change your SSID name from the default to something harder to guess will provide even more security.

If you really want to lock down your network, enabling MAC address filtering is a strong way to keep hackers out. A MAC address is a unique identifier for a wireless device. Filtering by this identifier allows only the devices you specify to even attempt to connect to your network, regardless of whether or not the person attempting to connect knows the network's SSID. MAC address filtering is a lengthier process than any of the other tips outlined here, so have your router's manual handy.

There are many more ways to secure your wireless network, some far more complicated than the above tips, but these alone will go a long way toward keeping your network safe.