Worries over widespread unauthorised use of unsecured Wi-Fi

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 10 December 2007 18:02

Opinion and Analysis

If not, buying a new Wi-Fi adaptor, be it in an internal PCI card, a PCMCIA card or a USB Wi-Fi adaptor, preferably of the same brand as the router you are using (although that’s not 100% essential), will provide the upgrade to the best consumer encryption of WPA2.

Another thing you can do to protect your network from hackers is to set up the MAC addressing, so only computers with MAC addresses (of each computer’s network card) are registered with the wireless broadband router. If a computer with an unrecognised MAC address tries to connect, even if they have the right password, the router won’t let them connect.

Once all the computers you want to connect wirelessly to your own Wi-Fi network are connected, and are set up to connect automatically, you can then tell your wireless broadband router to turn off the broadcast of your wireless network’s name, also known as the SSID, often set to something like ‘wireless’ or the name of the manufacturer of your wireless broadband router.

That helps to further obscure your network from appearing on the computer screens of other people who are living nearby or simply are nearby and are searching for wireless networks on handheld computers.

It should come as no surprise that a dedicated hacker could still, in theory, break through all of these protections and find a way to connect to your network.

But it would take a lot of time, the logs on your router that save details of connection attempts will indicate intrusion attempts long before a successful hack occurs, if the user checks them, meaning someone trying to break in would move onto easier targets.

The ultra paranoid can change their WPA2 password on a regular basis, but the simple act of turning on the security at all is still the major problem out there.

If you’re not sure about the status of your Wi-Fi passwords and connection details, please check them. If you’re not sure about setting up your router, ask a tech-savvy friend to help, or get the assistance of one of the computer tech help companies that come to your door to do it for you.

In addition, make sure you’re running the latest Internet Security software set to update automatically, along with automatic operating system updates, whether purchased as commercial packages from stores or cobbled together using well known free alternatives.

And please help your friends and family to ensure their connections are securely set up as well. A friend recently called to say he’d received a several thousand dollar bill from his ISP for extra data usage charges.

Turns out he didn’t have his encryption and security set up on his wireless broadband router and other people had been downloading movies from his connection – with him having no idea who they specifically were, although likely other people in the same building.

For more information on setting up your wireless security, this ComputerWorld tutorial is very good while PC World’s is great too.