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Home Wireless Security
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Since you folks are reading the Saugeen and Kincardine Times, you are way ahead of the game. If you've set up a wireless network in your home, you are way, way ahead of the game, but how about security? The whole of North America is rapidly becoming wireless in large areas and in hotels and motels. If a public building is not wireless, then they just are not with the program. Bruce County has been very, very slow to do anything. You have to be careful in your home to make sure you protect yourself from hackers real or clumsy. Setting up the security on your home network is quite easy. The largest supplier of Internet switches and hubs both wireless and not, is the giant CISCO company who markets the Linksys brand that you can buy most anywhere. (don't forget the handy repeaters too) They are easy to set up to make your home wireless so you can sit around with a laptop or walk around with a standup.... hmmm. I've been at some friends houses that always have 3 laptops going at once. It's really cheap and quite effective, but you have to be careful. It's best to get your wireless hub as high as you can in your house, but if you do, then you are broadcasting the signal out in a sphere just like a radio signal. Don't worry about the Gulls, they will not hack your network. You might have propagation nodes that reach to your next door neighbour and way beyond. Anybody can jump on your network and use it, if you don't have it secured. It's quite easy to secure it. The hub is just like any other Internet device and it has an address on your network 13/01/2009 04:23 PM |
Instead of being something like www.saugeentimes.com, it might look like http://192.168.1.1 for wrt54G hubs. This is the actual address of the Linksys machine that both you and the house next door might both have. When the device is shipped it is not secured and anyone can tap into it that goes by in a car in front of your house. The pre-supplied password is Admin. All hackers need to do is type http://192.168.1.1 and then, use the password Admin and they are into the guts of your network. They can do all sorts of mischief then! So what to do? It's quite easy to put a new password into your hub and secure it. It takes about 5 minutes, but you have to read the notes sent with your devise or better still find a handy guide on the net to do it. It will give you about 2 pages of instructions. If the device is working well and you are patient, you're ok. You can set up two passwords one for changing any settings on the hub in the future and one for logging on to your in home network. When your laptop friends come over, they will need to know the password. You can change it later. The security used is called WPA for WI-FI Protected Access. It's all done 'auto-magically' for you in your hub and in the software, so once you get things set up and you don't play around with it, you should be set for home use anyway. It uses sophisticated encryption techniques with keys, so it's good for anything short of really serious business, banking or national secrets. One more word of caution. When you stay at a hotel with an unsecure network, you can be hacked by an expert. Don't use your credit card on an unsecured network, ever. Good luck....
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