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Most wireless networking devices will give you the option of broadcasting the SSID. This
is a option for convenience, allowing anyone to log into your wireless network. In this
case, however, anyone includes hackers. So don't broadcast the SSID.
A default SSID is set on your wireless devices by the factory. (The Corinex default SSID
is "corinex".) Hackers know these defaults and can check these against your network.
Change your SSID to something unique and not something related to your company or
the networking products you use.
Changing your SSID regularly will force any hacker attempting to gain access to your
wireless network to start looking for that new SSID.
With these three steps in mind, please remember that while SSIDs are good for
segmenting networks, they fall short with regards to security. Hackers can usually find
them quite easily.
6) MAC addresses
Enable MAC address filtering if your wireless products allow it. MAC address filtering will
allow you to provide access to only those wireless nodes with certain MAC addresses.
This makes it harder for a hacker using a random MAC address or spoofing (faking) a
MAC address.
7) Firewalls
Once a hacker has broken into your wireless network, if it is connected to your wired
network, they'll have access to that, too. This means that the hacker has effectively used
your wireless network as a backdoor through your firewall, which you've put in place to
protect your network from just this kind of attack via the Internet.
You can use the same firewall technology to protect your wired network from hackers
coming in through your wireless network as you did for the Internet. Rather than
connecting your access point to an unprotected switch, swap those out for a router with
a built-in firewall. The router will show the access point coming in through its WAN port
and its firewall will protect your network from any transmissions entering via your
wireless network. PCs unprotected by a firewall router should at least run firewall
software, and all PCs should run up-to-date antiviral software.
B. WEP
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is often looked upon as a panacea for wireless security
concerns. This is overstating WEP's ability. Again, this can only provide enough security
to make a hacker's job more difficult.
WEP encryption implementation was not put in place with the 802.11 standard. This
means that there are about as many methods of WEP encryption as there are providers
of wireless networking products. In addition, WEP is not completely secure. One piece of
