More and more people choose to work from home than ever before. The advantages include avoiding early morning and evening hours, having time with your children and others, and doing all on your own. Although there are many obstacles, the one I will focus on in this article is to establish a secure wireless network for your home company. Right now, somewhere out, there's someone with a receiver waiting to pick up the local wireless network of a suspect. They hope to collect sensitive information that could lead to identity theft and theft of proprietary business data.
Although they may be power users, the majority of business owners are not technically inclined, in general security settings is not one of the first things they want to do in their daily operations. Most wireless LANs are therefore a great target for predators of information.
Here are some general guidelines for the establishment of your wireless network. While it may vary from seller to seller, the gist is about the same:
1. Set the wireless access/router point to a wired customer.
2. Always change the factory password to something hard to imagine.
3. Enable encryption of 128-bit wired equivalency privacy (WEP) on both your network and access point. Change the WEP key entries from time to time. It may be time to replace the dinosaur if your hardware doesn't support a minimum of 128 bit WEP encryption. WEP is only a minimum safety precaution, better than none.
4. Change the default factory SSID on the access/router to a string that's hard to guess. To connect to this configured SSID, initiate your computer by default.
5. Setup your access point to prevent the SSID from being broadcast if available.
6. Block anonymous requests and pings for the internet.
7. P2P Connections should be deactivated.
8. Activate MAC filtering.
9. Activate network router/access point firewall, disabled with demilitarized area function. Enable customer firewalls for each network computer.
10. As updates become available, update the router and access point firmware.
11. Make sure that the physical router is hidden so the settings cannot be reset by a random person.
12. Place the physical router near the center of the establishment instead of near windows, to prevent signals from being received by others outside.
These and other configurations collectively help prevent unwanted intrusions into your private data.
