Need advice securing my home WiFi connection (1 Viewer)

[Kevin G.]

Well I had to move all our equipment to the living room, as our new baby took over the "computer room". The fairly new highspeed was hardwired to the "computer room". I really didn't feel like re wiring, or paying my provider to come in and rewire...so I went to "Wireless G", I bought the router and a USB antenna, (no wireless card in my "new" DELL.) and set everything up....Voila'

 

[Vivek_IVB]

Oh, my bad - i thought when you said desktop you meant wired. Didn't realize you had bought a wireless antenna.

So, you will have to do this in 2 steps:
1) login to your router, enable WEP/Wap, add a key
2) as soon as you hit apply, you'll lose the cxn to your router. Not to worry, even if you screw up this step it's not the end of the world. Right click on the network icon in your system tray or your linksys monitor, type in the same key.

your desktop should now be reconnected to your network, and you've gotten what some feel is the "major" part of security implemented.

you should still do those other steps to inoculate yourself against the other threats, though.

 

[Kevin G.]

ok, so under further scrutiny, under my default profile, I have:
Wireless mode...Infrastructure

Transfer Rate... Auto

Channel ......Auto

Security.....PSK(TKIP)

Authentication.....PSK

I cannot logon to my router, I know the password, but not the ID.

 

[Vivek_IVB]

try admin for the id. if it doesn't work, do you still have the manual? it's a generic id, IIRC.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I would guess that this is basically the "meat
and potatoes" of what needs to be done to secure
a wireless network. Yes?

Now...about the key. Is this a hex key or can
you put in a normal text password?

 

[Scott Merryfield]

It's a normal text password. Pick something difficult to crack -- a combination of letters and numbers is best. Avoid obvious things like your name, address, etc.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

If you use WPA - which you really should - you enter a plaintext passphrase. Make it as long and convoluted as you can stand, for instance by writing a whole sentence together as a word and replacing some characters with numbers (ie, "y0g1bearlivesinjellyst0ne" or some such...)

The absolutely best choice is to have an extremely difficult passphrase that is 63 characters long - but you need to have a way to cut and paste that key when you need it on a laptop, etc. Having it in a file on a USB memory stick for instance might work.

I'm talking about a passhprase something like:

dP7.a:[tYIcP|H7BhbltPK}bEcp/){GNwK#//K(L:](jg-jV@|{TKln'ISX8J'

A key generator online can be found at http://www.kurtm.net/wpa-pskgen/ as well as info as to why you want the passphrase from hell rather than "passphrase"