How do I secure my home wireless network?

[judgesmails]

Just bought and started using a wireless router at home.

How do I prevent my neighbors from using my connection, also, more importantly, how do I keep potential hackers from getting into my computer through my wireless connection?

I am not very well informed, so if anyone can give me some simple products or specific steps to follow, I would appreciate it a great deal.

Thanks in advance.

[SamIAm]

Read the manual that came with your router on how to access the settings. Turn on WEP. You'll set a key, and then type that key on each computer in your network when asked.
-Sam

P.S. Also change the default password on your router.

[Freakin]

you can also turn off SSID broadcast and turn on MAC address filtering

[wonderwes]

One cool thing about the Linksys WRT54g it will secure mostly all wireless aspects with a simple mouse click. You want to turn on WPA not WEP.

[LazyRobot]

Unfortunately kiddies are easily cracking WEP in less then a few minutes these days...oh, and they can spoof the macs too.

[jdog1999]

[ QUOTE ]
Unfortunately kiddies are easily cracking WEP in less then a few minutes these days...oh, and they can spoof the macs too.

[/ QUOTE ]

While this is true, most of the war dirvers are looking for easy targets. If you take the steps to implement basic security you should be safe unless someone targets you specifically. You can do a google search for wireless security to get some good pointers.

[judgesmails]

I followed the original advice and set the WEP encryption and changed the SSDI. Everything worked fine.

After reading how vulnerable WEP is I reconfigured the router for WPA2 Personal encryption.

When I try to use that Key from my wireless laptop, I get an error message.

Do I have to reconfigure anything on my network settings to get this to work?

Thanks again for all the help.

[obsidian]

I really wish WPA was supported by more devices. My problem is both Tivo and Nintendo DS do not support WPA.

[kyleb]

I wrote this simple guide:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showfl...p;vc=1&nt=6