How to secure Wireless Network

If you have a Wi-Fi network at home or in a small office, intruders may be after you, such as casual "war drivers" who troll city streets, looking for unprotected wireless networks.
It may not just be malicious attackers who cause problems. If you don't change the defaults of your wireless network, a neighbor with the same router make and model might accidentally connect to your network, stealing your bandwidth or reconfiguring your router and network without your knowledge.
Fear not, though. There's plenty you can do to protect yourself. In this article, We'll show you how.

Change your administrator password
Before you do anything else, change the administrator password on your router. Every model of router comes preconfigured with a standard password, and hackers know this. So it's exceedingly easy for someone to hop onto your network, gain full control over its administrative rights and wreak havoc.

Stop broadcasting your network's SSID -- and change its name
Your service set identifier (SSID) is your network's name, and if people know what your SSID is, it's easier for them to find your network and connect to it. Your router broadcasts its SSID, and that broadcast tells passersby there's a network there. It also gives out the name.
So, if you turn off SSID broadcasting, you'll go partway toward keeping casual users from seeing your network. But doing that, by itself, won't necessarily solve the problem. Even if you stop broadcasting your network's name, people might still be able to connect to your network. That's because manufacturers generally ship their wireless routers with the same generic SSID; for example, Linksys routers all have the SSID Linksys by default. So, even if you stop broadcasting your SSID, intruders can easily guess your router's name and log on.

Use encryption
If you take only one step to protect your home or small office network, it should be this: Use encryption. Wi-Fi networks are incredibly convenient -- and incredibly easy to spy upon. All that data going out over the air among your PCs and between your PCs and the Internet can easily be snooped on by anyone nearby using simple, off-the-shelf software such as packet sniffers.
There are two encryption Wi-Fi standards --- Wireless Equivalent Protocol (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). Don't use WEP -- it's not nearly as safe as WPA. In fact, the biggest security breach in history was caused because a store owned by TJX Companies Inc. that used WEP, which allowed hackers to break in to the network.

Protect yourself using MAC addresses
There's another way to protect your wireless network: Tell it to allow only certain computers to connect, and ban all others. To do that, you'll filter by Media Access Control (MAC) addresses, which are in essence IDs for wireless adapters. Every piece of networking hardware has a unique MAC address. So you'll be able to tell your router to allow only specific MAC addresses onto the network and keep all others off.