Episode 5: Securing Your Wireless Router

Let's talk securing your wireless router. 

So let's pretend there's a car parked just down the road from your house and in that car is a person with a laptop. Let's say they're able to connect to your not-so-secure wireless router. Potentially, they can see and capture everything you're doing from your banking to your emails. Even jumping on any shared drive you may have and spying on your pictures and documents. 

Obviously, this article would be too large to cover every step for every brand of router out there, so we're just going to go over the generics and you can google the how-to's of each step as it pertains to your brand of router. In most cases, you should be able to get into the administrative portal of your router by opening up a web browser and typing in your IP gateway address. This will usually be 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1. Again you may google you brand and see what it is and the default administrative password.

1. Change that default password.
2. Allow admin access only from a wired connection.
3. Make sure the wifi security you're using is WPA2 (not WEP). 
4. Use AES Encryption.
5. Make your pre-shared key (your wifi password) as complex as what we discussed in Episode 1 regarding passwords.
6. Not broadcasting your SSID has not shown any significant security vulnerabilities so you can keep that on.
7. Keep your router up to date by performing firmware updates. If your router is old, you may consider buying a new one to keep up with the latest security measures.
8. Disable UPnP (Universal Plug N Play).
9. Turn on WAN ping blocking or Block ICMP. This should be in the firewall section of your router settings.
10. If you don't anticipate a lot of guests on your network, enable MAC address filtering. This surely will test your security vs. convenience patience as you will need to find and enter the MAC addresses of every device that connects to your network into your router. You will then need to remember this setting as you get new devices. But this setting will ensure that no one will be able to get onto your network even if they cracked your wifi password. Each device comes with a unique MAC address and there are no two in the world.
11. Backup your settings.