Wireless Worries
Sunday, November 2, 2003

An unprotected wireless network can be an inviting target to outsiders. Connecting to the Internet wirelessly is catching on with consumers, but many wireless products come with important safeguards turned off to make it easier for newbies to get up and running with a minimum of angst.

Left unsecured, that Internet connection is effectively open to anyone within range. Perhaps that's not a problem with the Internet-mooching neighbor on the sixth floor who wants to piggyback on your wireless connection to check his e-mail. But what about the random stranger who wants to eavesdrop on your Internet traffic?

To keep the freeloaders and snoopers away, you want to make it hard for their wireless cards to see your connection.

The first step is to encrypt the connection using what's called Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). This encryption is flawed and can be cracked without too much effort -- but if your neighbor isn't using WEP while you are, the bad guys will go for the easier target. Don't forget to set a non-obvious WEP password, either. (Some new hardware supports a better protection scheme called WPA, or WiFi Protected Access; if all your hardware allows this, it's much more secure than WEP.)

The second step is to make it harder for strangers to see your network at all. Go into the software that controls your WiFi access point and set it to run in closed or private mode. This way, it won't broadcast your network's name -- or, to use the proper jargon, its secure service indicator (SSID). You should also change the name of your WiFi network from something other than what was chosen for the (easy-to-guess) default setting.

You can further prevent outsiders from intruding on your network by restricting access to devices you've authorized. This is done by entering each one's Ethernet hardware address (the unique set of numbers and letters assigned to each WiFi or wired network device) into your WiFi software.

None of these approaches is foolproof but, combined, they should ward off casual intruders.

For the truly concerned, one more suggestion: Put a firewall on each computer in the house as a second line of defense, then make sure each PC is set to share only designated folders, not its entire hard drive.

-- M.M. and R.P.


WPTech
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