How to protect your home network

Bob Sullivan Technology correspondent • Profile • E-mail

When you work at home, the definition of “office” tends to be a bit loose. Sure, there’s your official desk in the spare bedroom or next to the laundry machine. But work at home long enough and you and your laptop will soon be wandering around your home: from TV to fridge to front yard, all without missing an e-mail. This is the glory of wireless.

Wireless networks are everywhere. In fact, in the past 18 months, they surpassed old-fashioned, tethering wired networks as the method of choice for connecting computers at home.  According to Jupiter Research, there's now over 12 million wireless home networks floating around America.

You probably knew that; because if you flipped open your laptop on your front steps, you've seen almost that many listed when you ask it to "View available wireless networks."

We love wireless. In fact, we love it so much that we like to share it. Nearly everyone with a wireless card or chip has now had the experience of seeing just how many neighbors have wireless routers turned on. So you know what the problem is.

Reading e-mail in bed is great, but you knew there was a catch, didn’t you? If you can walk around your house picking your files out of thin air, so can anyone else. In fact, the snooper doesn’t even have to be in your house. The little radio station you install in your home to beam the Internet around the place doesn’t understand property lines. So when you go wireless, you should know that neighbors several houses away can see what you are doing. Yes, they can literally pick your data right out of the air.

Despite all the publicity surrounding wireless insecurity, experts still believe many home wireless networks are left casually insecure like this, with people unknowingly sending their newly “liberated” data up and down the block all day long. Frank Hanzlik, managing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, would not peg a number, but he said "a good percentage" of those 12.6 million users haven't turned on their wireless security.

That's a lot of exposed data flying around.

The good news is, there’s a lot you can do to severely decrease the odds that you’ll be snooped.

Four basic steps
Protecting your home wireless network is a good news/bad news story. First, the bad news. Most experts will tell you that there’s practically no way to make it completely safe from prying eyes. Every encryption standard eventually gets cracked.  But the good news is almost all wireless devices now sold come with a new, improved standard that's much stronger than previous wireless devices, called WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access).

Still, it's useless if you don't turn it on. And for some reason, wireless manufacturers continue to insist on shipping wireless devices with the security turned off. That's asking for trouble. But on the flip side, installation wizards are making it ever easier to turn on security measures.

"The industry is really working on make it easier to set up. There are a lot of one-button wizards, for example," Hanzlick said. Still, every device is different, and consumers still seem confused about wireless safety — evidenced by the number of insecure networks that are around. "There are great solutions, but they are still not enough."  

To make sure everyone's on the same page, here's a handy checklist of four steps that home wireless users can take to greatly reduce the likelihood that someone will snoop your data.

1. Don't call attention to yourself
Each wireless device has a name, called a Service Set Identifier, or SSID. Any device that tries to hop onto the wireless party line must know this name. By default, most networks broadcast this name to make connecting easier — the equivalent of saying to the world “here’s my front door, it’s probably open if you want to try it.” That’s a good idea if you are Starbucks, and you want customers to breeze in and out of your network. It’s a bad idea if you don’t want Victor, the voyeur next door, to read your e-mail. Turn off the broadcast SSID function and you’ve won 25 percent of the battle. It means a hacker will have to guess your network’s name to get in.

2. Change your name
Now, make guessing that name much harder — change it. Wireless network vendors ship their products with SSID names set to obvious defaults. For example, the popular LINKSYS product often uses the name “linksys” as its SSID, until it’s changed. Hackers know this, and wander round town using programs with names like “Netstumbler” to see who’s leaving their data up for grabs. If they detect you’re using a Linksys card, they may attempt to connect to your network by trying the linksys SSID. Take another moment to change the default, and you’re halfway there. If you change your SSID every few months, you’re more than half way home.

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