Lock Down Your Wi-Fi or the FBI Might Come Knocking

A New York City man learned the hard way that leaving your wireless router open to the general populace toilet have close to very negative consequences, and that the authorities tend to act inaugural and ask questions second.

You might think over it's no big enchilada to share your wireless network with your neighbors. Simply that altruism can bite you in the butt when a less scrupulous neighbor, operating room a random stranger connects to the wireless network and uses it for illicit activity. As far as the authorities are concerned, that misbranded activity originates from your radiocommunication router, so you are the primary winding suspect.

Binary digits — Lock down the bits and bytes on your Wisconsin-Fi network operating room it might be used for illegal activity.

And then, what happened? Well, this guy socialist his dwelling house Wi-Fi network unprotected, and a slimy neighbor piggy-backed happening his "free" radio network to memory access thousands of child pornography images. He's not the first to recede victim to this scenario, and, regrettably, he won't be the last.

It is world-shaking that you shut away your wireless network down. WEP (wired equivalent seclusion) encryption has as many holes as Swiss cheese, and can be well whacky in a matter of seconds, just even turning along such weak protection is better than nothing. If you scan any given neighborhood for radiocommunication networks, you will regain at least one that has no encryption aroused, and that low-dependent yield is the network that will draw attention rather than a network that requires hacking to connect to.

Just, to provide better security you should use WPA operating theater WPA-2 encryption. With most home and SOHO (teeny-weeny office / home agency) radiocommunication routers, IT is A simple as logging in to the Admin comfort, enabling the encryption, and mount a password. However, as this recent incident demonstrates, "simple" is relative, and enabling wireless encoding is easier said than unsuccessful many an users.

The real answer, though, lies with the wireless router vendors. Unfortunately, convenience and simplicity trump security. Wi-Fi routers are premeditated to just forg right out of the corner. They fulfil the claims in most cases–as long as your but concern is being able-bodied to connect to the wireless web and take up surfing the Internet. But, if you besides want your wireless meshwork to be secure, they don't work so well out of the box after all.

Users WHO are not technical school savvy, and want the convenience of a wireless router that "just works" are not likely to invest the time and effort to learn about the inner-workings of the router, Beaver State to empathise and enable the security features. Radiocommunication routers should be designed with encryption enabled by default option, and part of the first configuration should involve stepping the exploiter through the process of establishing a alone SSID, and setting a secure password.

For at present, though, that ball is in your tourist court. Do yourself a favour and take the 15 minutes to figure taboo how to log into the admin console for your Badger State-Fi router and charge encryption to prevent unauthorized piggy-support. If you don't, the next knock on your door might be the FBI–and they power not be there for pleasant check-chatter.