The Importance of Secure Wi-Fi Networks and How to Protect Them

Whether it’s for home or office use, your Wi-Fi network should be secure and inaccessible to unauthorized people. However, since the Wi-Fi signals are available a few meters from your building too, others can also hack into it and connect to your private network.

The danger here is that people who access your Wi-Fi network illegally, can also invade your online privacy by:

• Sending spam or performing illegal activities using your connection
• Slowing down your internet by hogging your bandwidth
• Gaining access to files on your system and spreading virus
• Gaining access to your log-in IDs and passwords

Though most individuals and organizations go to great length to protect their Wi-Fi networks and prevent unauthorized access, hackers may still gain access as Wi-Fi signals are easily broadcast outside the wall perimeters of the building. So, here’s a look at some useful tips that you can use to further secure your Wi-Fi network:

Rogue Wireless Access Points

Rogue Wi-Fi access points present a huge online threat to the host network. These access points are not amongst those provided by the host Wi-Fi, but have been discreetly brought in by nefarious visitors. They clandestinely attach to a host access point and conceal it.

Use WPA

There are still a number of Wi-Fi access points that come with the older WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) standard of security. Since it’s easy to hack into, protect your Wi-Fi network by using WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) or the more recent WPA2.

Use Secure WPA Passwords

A commonly used method to protect your Wi-Fi network from those hackers is by changing your routers default WPA password with a different password or passphrase. And to ensure that you have created a sufficiently strong password, there are services available online to test their efficiency.

The service will ask you for data that hackers can gain access to by breaking into your Wi-Fi network. The service will then try to extract your password from the shared data.

Guest Networks

Create a separate network for your guests. This would mean that your guests can access your internet, but not your primary internal network. This also ensures that they won’t infect your primary network with viruses or malware.