Securing Your Wireless Network

Or “The One Where You Don’t Trust Your Neighbors”.  Many people don’t think it’s very important to secure their home wireless networks, but I am telling you it IS important.  These are the reasons why…

1. Access – Did you know that if your neighbors log into your wireless network they could now access files on your computer?  The wireless network allows you to share information between your devices, so you can show your photos on your Xbox or access a document you have stored on a different computer.  When your wireless network is letting anyone in, they now have access to all of that too. 

2. Illegal activity – If your neighbor or even someone just nearby logs onto your wireless network, and participates in illegal activity, whether it’s hacking, or spamming, or anything else, did you know that YOU would be responsible and held liable for that activity.  They would trace the activity back to your IP address, and bust YOU for the crimes!

3. Slowness – Some Internet Service Providers only allow you a certain amount of downloads/uploads a month until they start “throttling” your connection, which means they purposely start slowing it down.  Also if someone using your network is streaming a movie, and you are trying to get some work done online, your connection is going to be much slower.

4. Fairness – Why would you have to pay for something that others are getting for free!  You are paying a monthly fee for internet access.  If they are logging onto your network, they are not.  It’s stealing from you, and it’s not fair to you.

5. Safety – Sometimes when one computer on a network gets infected with a virus, it can spread the payload to the other computers on the network!  You don’t want infections on your computers because you didn’t take the time to secure your network.

Now that you finally believe me that it’s important to secure your network… check out this article that explains how to do it…

http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/2159/Google_Sniffing_Beta_tm

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