How to Secure a Wireless Network

This clip from the FrugalTech show offers some tips on securing a wireless network. If have any tips to share please share them with us. Distributed by Tubemogul.

Video Transcription

Very serious thing. A lot of us have wireless networks in our homes and in our offices, and the problem with a lot of wireless networks is that they are not properly secured. So I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about how to secure your wireless network properly. Well, the first thing you need to know, is that wireless networks have what's called an SSID. Now what that stands for is called a Service Set Identifier. It's a 32 characters, be numbers, letters, whatever, that's the ID or the name of your local wireless network. And what you want to do, the first thing is you want to make that invisible, and that's a setting in your wireless router to make it invisible, and that way when people drive by with their WiFi and all that sort of thing, they won't see that wireless network identifying itself. They have to know the name of it. It's like making your wireless network vanish to the public. So that's the first thing you want to do, is hide your SSID broadcast. You want to set a password. You know, if your network is open, it doesn't require password, then everything flying around that network of the air is, is just like shuting across the room in a party. So you want to encrypt a password, protect the data that's been transmitting over the wire, as network. Now there are several different encryption mechanisms. The very lowest on the scale is called WEP, and it is really truly the weakest method of encrypting your data. So I really recommend that you avoid it, unless it's the only option you have got. Now there is another level which is better, called WPA. But the top of the line for most simpler networks is called WPA2, and add that to the security settings in your router, and likely WPA2 personal, if you're small business users consumer hardware. So it allows small businesses use consumer class hard workers. Oh buddy, If you've seen the price tags of some of these high-end commercial great routers, they are not only quite expensive, so understand you have got to save a buck, and there is nothing wrong with some of these if you take some extra precaution. Well, the next and final piece of advice I will give you, is called filter by MAC address. Maybe you have heard this term, a MAC address before or not, but essentially a Mac address is a hardware identifier to factory the set on a network type device, a Ethernet/network printer, what have you. So they even have their own unique name if you will. You can basically tell your wireless router to only allow computers and devices with a particular MAC addresses to connect your network. So if you hide your identifier, the name of your network, if you choose strong encryption, and you filter by your MAC address, you are going to have a much, much more secured wireless network. This is, just takes a few minutes to do, it's actually fairly simple to do, if not, I am sure you can find a tech somewhere to give you a hand, and get that setup for you. And believe me, it's going to be cheap insurance, give you a good peace of mind. What you don't want is, you don't want strangers connecting your wireless network, and doing God knows what, over the air with your network.