How to protect your home network

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3. Scramble your data
Thanks to days gone by when the various brands of wireless devices didn’t play nice with each other, manufacturers decided it was best to turn off encryption when their products were sold. That solved some of the incompatibility problems, but it created the big problem we have today — namely, that when Victor the neighbor hops onto your network, he can read your e-mail because it flies around your house in plain text. But nearly all new devices have an option to scramble the data using an encryption tool called WPA, or the newest standard WPA2. It's superior to the old WEP standard, which could be cracked fairly easily. Set correctly, it also keeps Victor from even hopping on your network to use your bandwidth for some casual Web surfing of his own. That's probably a good idea; at least, your DSL provider will think so, because Victor will have to get his own DSL.

The Wi-Fi Alliance has a list of products that meet its encryption standards.

Unfortunately, there's still a lot of WEP hardware and networks still in operation. And while there are no published hacks of WPA, techniques for hacking into WEP networks are improving all the time. It used to take hours to hack into WEP-protected data; now some are claiming it can be done in minutes — or even seconds. So if what you are doing at home is at all critical, upgrading to new equipment is probably a good idea.

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4. Telecommute through a tunnel
If you’re using your home office to run a small business, this step won’t help you. But if, like many, you’re telecommuting to an office, you need know about Virtual Private Networks, or VPN. A VPN creates a digital “tunnel” between your backyard laptop and your office. It’s essentially a special piece of software that’s used to log on to the office network (and you’ll need to get help from your office to set up your access). But the tunnel is fortified with better encryption than WEP — so much better, that most experts think it’s nearly foolproof. The good news is the tunnel that protects data as it travels over the phone line and the Internet to your office also protects it as it flies around the airwaves near your home. When you are sending traffic through the tunnel, it’s nearly certain a hacker can’t sniff it.

There is a caveat — the tunnel only protects data that’s destined for the office. Even if you are logged on to the VPN, when you send files around your home network, they are not protected by the tunnel. So for example, when you download a secret company merger document off a server, and look at it on your laptop in at the edge of your swimming pool, the data is protected. But if you beam it to your printer in your home office, it’s not — unless you have followed steps one, two and three.

An exclusive list
There is one additional step that can be taken, but it’s only available with some wireless devices. Every computer device with networking capabilities has a unique MAC address, a bit like a serial number. Some wireless devices allow users to create an “authorize MAC address table” which means only devices with these specific serial numbers are allowed on the network. Hackers can “spoof” MAC addresses, effectively telling their computer to impersonate one of yours. But to do so, they will have to somehow learn your device’s serial number — another serious hurdle to overcome.

Even with all these steps, experts concede that there’s no way to promise 100 percent security for a wireless network — and in fact, there's no such thing as perfect security for any network. Protecting a home wireless network is more about improving the odds that you’ll be safe than it is about slamming the door around Fort Knox. And in fact, many federal government departments still don’t allow wireless networks because of the various security concerns.

One simple step
All four of the steps to making wireless secure are important; but if you are so short on time or attention that you can only take one step, Hanzlik said turning on encryption is by far the most important — whether you have an old WEP device or a new WAP one.

"The easiest thing to do is just enable encryption," he said. That way, even if someone hops onto your network, they won't be able to see what you are doing, unless they have special hacking tools. "You've just got to flick that switch."

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