Three easy steps to improve your wireless network security (10/10/2006)

Is your wireless network secure?

That's a question that is on everyone's minds nowadays. And while everyone would love to answer "Absolutely yes", that probably isn't possible. While everyone would love to have a 24x7 rapid response security force standing over your home or business network, few network owners can afford that.

But there's a huge difference between absolute security and good security. And the reality is that most businesses and consumers consider security to be too much trouble, yet good security doesn't require a lot of work. Here are three simple steps that will make your network much more secure in just a few minutes.

  • Turn on your firewall. Most networking devices ship with a firewall for network protection, but most users never bother to turn them on because they aren’t sure how to do it. NETGEAR makes it easy by shipping their routers with the firewall already turned on for you. And almost every router NETGEAR ships today has both a Network Address Translation (NAT) firewall in it, and a Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) firewall which combine to offer maximum protection. If your router doesn’t have both types of firewalls, consider purchasing one that does.
  • Enable a network password. More than sixty percent of the wireless networks in an urban area are open networks -- that is, they don't require an authentication key (i.e., a password) to use them. If you do require a password and encrypt your traffic, what will a potential intruder do? Move on to one of the open networks. And this is also easy to do: just select a security mode other than "Open Network" on your NETGEAR router.
  • Encrypt your data. While requiring a password makes it harder to join your network, it still doesn't prevent eavesdroppers from listening in. To prevent others from intercepting your data, you simply need to select an encryption type that is supported by your wireless card. The simplest choice is just to select WEP, the industry standard.

There, that wasn't so bad, was it? Three quick changes to your router configuration, and your network is already more secure than most.