Fortify your wireless home office

To deter this obnoxious and sinister enemy you need to learn the tactics for preventing intrusion, and ultimately fortify your wireless home office from all kinds of attacks. The best thing for you to do is to use a direct connection to your internet or your network of computers in your home office. But if you truly must have a wireless network in your home, you’d better do a little work to fortify your network.

For starters, lets move that Wi Fi router of yours away from the walls and any doors. Centralize your base! Move your wireless station to the center of

your room or home, and keep your wireless router away from all windows. If you live in an apartment, keep your signal away from neighboring walls. Once again, it is highly advisable to use a direct LAN line instead of a wireless router. No matter how centralized your router is, there are antennas made to either expand a wireless network or pick up on hard to reach signals. These antennas run for about $100, and are widely available to anyone with the desire to purchase one.

Get rid of those ridiculous default settings! Typically your wireless router can enable WEP, but it is often set to the low 24-bit encryption by default. This leaves your home office fortress wide open to even the most casual intruder. To rectify this you will change the setting of the WEP to 64-bit encryption. If your wireless router happens to support a 128-bit encryption, then you are even better armed by using this setting. If you don’t have the 128-bit encryption support, and you really should, the device may simply need a driver to upgrade. Check the manufacturer’s website for your specific model, and do a keyword search for “support, driver, and upgrade”. You will also want to limit the access to your network by removing the function that assigns IP addresses to clients. To do this you will need to turn off the DHCP. The DHCP is a protocol that allows devices to connect to a network automatically. By turning off the DHCP protocol, you make it harder for intruders to gain access to your network.

Next is something that may seem silly, but please be assured that nothing could be further from the truth. Do not use your name, a pet’s name, or anything else that might generally reveal information about you, for the name of your wireless connection. To use your name is the equivalent of putting a sign on your house which reads something to the effect of “Burglars Welcome!”. You will set into effect the improvements to your wireless system by accessing the service set identifier (SSID). Here you will change the SSID and the password for all devices on your network. As a rule of thumb, it is best to practice using passwords that do not relate to your personal life,

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