WiFi and Security

There are two main security concerns with WiFi - people accessing your information while in transit and people gaining accessing to your local network and your computer.

 

To protect information in transit follow these generally accepted best practices:

Be careful about sending passwords over public wifi! Don't use the same paassword for Feacebook that you do for your email or your bank account and don't access bank accounts or other sensitive information over public wifi.

 

 

Don't worry that some sites - like this one - don't use encryption just to sign in. Just don't use the same password for non-secure sites as for secure sites. If you don't want to remember a lot of passwords, let your browser or system remember (more on that later in another tips and tricks) or use a couple different passwords: one for casual sites (social networking, professional, etc), one for sensitive informartion (email) and one for extremely sensitive information (bank accounts). If someone manages to get ahold of your Facebook password you can bet they will try it out on your bank accounts!

 

To protect your home network be sure to add a password to your network. Better yet use "MAC" addresses to limit what computers can connect to your router. No - that doesn't stand for Macintosh - it stands for "machine." Every wireless device has a unique MAC address. Your router has the capability of letting you limit access by MAC address. That way only computers with the right address can access your local network. If you don't know how to set up your router, call your internet service provider. They should have provided you with an instruction booklet and a user name and password for your router. Be sure to change these as every customer of that provider with a WiFi router got the SAME name and password you did! If you don't change these, anyone within range of your router could get in and change the settings to allow themselves access to your network.

 

This is just a quick overview. Internet Security is rapidly becoming a specialty field, but you can discourage all but the most determined and sophisticated hackers by taking these basic steps. They aren't generally interested in non-public figures, churches and non-profits. Banks, Corporations and wealthy and well known individuals and any organization that is often a target of negative publicity or other attacks should hire a security expert.