Have you ever heard of wardriving? You don’t need an armored vehicle to go wardriving. You don’t even need a slicked up Hummer. Wardriving is driving around in a car searching for an open wireless connection, i.e. an unsecured wireless connection. You don’t even need a car to use someone else’s wireless setup.
Your next door neighbor might now be accessing the internet via your unsecured wireless connection. In fact, if your connection is unsecured you are vulnerable to anyone in your neighborhood taking a free ride and possibly seeing personal information as well. The legalities of this are sketchy but the moral implications are obvious for most.
There is an easy way to secure your wireless internet from wardrivers, warwalkers or warwhatever (who attached ‘war’ to such a thing anyway). It’s probably sitting close by at this moment. It’s your wireless router & it contains a tool that provides a range of options and allows you to password protect the tool itself as well as any access to your wireless connection.
It’s called Base Station Management Tool. You access this tool via the internet. It’s the remote administration of your router and the address is something like http://192.168.1.1. So, how do you know exactly what your address or the Default Gateway of your router is? Go to Control Panel, Network Connections, Wireless Network Connection. You will see two tabs, General & Support. Click on Support. There you will see a collection of numbers with Default Gateway toward the bottom. That number is the address of your routers remote administration otherwise known as Base Station Management Tool.
Simply put that number into the address bar of your browser & hit enter on your keyboard. That will take you to a log-in page. Having never logged in before you will need to input the default password that came with your router. Odds are it is admin. The manual that came with your router will tell you. This is the first thing you will want to change.
After you’ve logged in you will see a set
of links to the left such as Home, Management, Local Area Network, etc. Click on Management to change the default password to one only you know. You now see a choice on the main page to Change Password. Click on this, put in the old password (like admin) and put in one you want. Click Apply. Record in a safe place for future reference.
The very next thing to do is to enable wireless security. Keep your neighbor from hogging your bandwidth and thus slowing your connection or worse from possibly seeing your information sent over the net. Go to Security on the left hand side of links. When that page comes up click on the Wireless Security link. On the page that appears you see a drop-down box for Wireless Encryption. Go for the strongest & enable 256 bit WPA-PSK (you may have an even stronger option depending on the age of your router:~ ). Below this on the same page you must make a password of completely random characters and numbers with a length of 8-63 characters.
Click Apply.
A word of caution as you go exploring other options in the Base Management Tool.
*Do not disable SSID broadcast or enable MAC filtering*.
It is too much trouble (trust me) & in my opinion are worthless precautions that may cause connectivity problems.
Your next door neighbor might now be accessing the internet via your unsecured wireless connection. In fact, if your connection is unsecured you are vulnerable to anyone in your neighborhood taking a free ride and possibly seeing personal information as well. The legalities of this are sketchy but the moral implications are obvious for most.
There is an easy way to secure your wireless internet from wardrivers, warwalkers or warwhatever (who attached ‘war’ to such a thing anyway). It’s probably sitting close by at this moment. It’s your wireless router & it contains a tool that provides a range of options and allows you to password protect the tool itself as well as any access to your wireless connection.
It’s called Base Station Management Tool. You access this tool via the internet. It’s the remote administration of your router and the address is something like http://192.168.1.1. So, how do you know exactly what your address or the Default Gateway of your router is? Go to Control Panel, Network Connections, Wireless Network Connection. You will see two tabs, General & Support. Click on Support. There you will see a collection of numbers with Default Gateway toward the bottom. That number is the address of your routers remote administration otherwise known as Base Station Management Tool.
Simply put that number into the address bar of your browser & hit enter on your keyboard. That will take you to a log-in page. Having never logged in before you will need to input the default password that came with your router. Odds are it is admin. The manual that came with your router will tell you. This is the first thing you will want to change.
After you’ve logged in you will see a set
of links to the left such as Home, Management, Local Area Network, etc. Click on Management to change the default password to one only you know. You now see a choice on the main page to Change Password. Click on this, put in the old password (like admin) and put in one you want. Click Apply. Record in a safe place for future reference. The very next thing to do is to enable wireless security. Keep your neighbor from hogging your bandwidth and thus slowing your connection or worse from possibly seeing your information sent over the net. Go to Security on the left hand side of links. When that page comes up click on the Wireless Security link. On the page that appears you see a drop-down box for Wireless Encryption. Go for the strongest & enable 256 bit WPA-PSK (you may have an even stronger option depending on the age of your router:~ ). Below this on the same page you must make a password of completely random characters and numbers with a length of 8-63 characters.
Click Apply.
A word of caution as you go exploring other options in the Base Management Tool.
*Do not disable SSID broadcast or enable MAC filtering*.
It is too much trouble (trust me) & in my opinion are worthless precautions that may cause connectivity problems.
This done you have now sent those wardriving voyeurs elsewhere.
Cowabunga dude!
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