Wireless Security

The season of goodwill is nearly upon us so what better way of sharing ones good fortune than to let your neighbours use your wireless network for free? If you don't have any encryption setup on your wireless network that is exactly what will happen.

Actually it is much worse than that because it is not just your neighbours who will be able to use your wireless network: Anyone with a wireless laptop sitting in a car outside your house can as well.

So why be bothered about it? It's paid for, so someone using a small part of your bandwidth won't be noticed?

There are three reasons why it matters:

Your network resources are exposed to unknown users
They can read your files and plant spying software on your computers all without you knowing.
All of your network traffic can be captured and examined
With the right tools web pages can be reconstructed in real time, the pages you visit logged and most importantly passwords captured.
Your Internet connection can be used for illegal activities
And, what is worse, it can me made to look like you did it. You could get sued for downloading music which is bad. Much, much worse could follow if your internet connection was used to access or upload child pornography.

If you are not convinced how serious the consequences of getting something on your computer are read this article: Trojan horse found responsible for child porn .

The absolute minimum you need to do is set the wireless router to use WEP encryption. WPA is better and WPA2 better still.

WEP security is weak enough that if someone really wanted to, over a period of a few days, they could break the encryption. If you change your WEP key every few days it is almost as secure as WPA. Of course only the very dedicated would actually do this.

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