Security How to keep your wi-fi network secure

£$%^&*()_[45SDF04JKF093%r&^*UOIEJSF0934

thats a good password, numbers and letters are crackable... so is the one above but not within a good time frame

Never mind taking a billion trillion years to crack it, it'd take that long to type the bugger in! Imagine setting up your Wii or a mobile device with a password like that, I'll stick to a small selection of letters and numbers cheers :)

The chance of someone in my (or any) area prowling around cracking WPA passwords at any level is minimal. There are plentiful amounts of open or wep connections around for them to take advantage of.
 
Last edited:
Nice little program to get hold of is Network Magic if you have wireless connections
 
I had my mates laptop and was checking it for him and needed to connect to the internet i took upstairs and i was doing a scan to see if it would pick up my router and it picked up 4 open connections in my area 1 ones close to me but dont know who ive been asking around my neighbours to see if i can track them and tell them they have an open connection now if i was dishonest id be on there like shot
 
or your little ones would connect to them by accident ;)
 
Just be aware that technically you stealing services even if the wi-fi is open.

Of course the wi-fi owner is potentially liable for any of your activities
 
Another aspect to think about would be to turn the wireless transmit power down, so the signal (to some extent) is contained within your house.
 
Hopefully im adding this to the correct thread.
If you have a wifi access point or router made in the the last couple of years , it probably has "wps" .
wps is VERY useful for setting up lots of wifi devices in an office. i have been doing just that this week. wps speeds the whole thing up.
very good so far.
wps stands for wifi protected setup.

i strongly advise that you switch off wps if you can - unless you have dozens of wifi devices to configure.
wps consists of eight digits . when you supply the wps enabled router with the correct wps code it will send you the full WPA password what ever it has been set to.
there is software out there that will try to brute force the wps code and there are ONLY eight digits to try. but it gets a LOT worse the final digit is just a checksum. so we are down to seven digits now. another problem with wps is that once you have the first four digits correct the router will let you "blitz" the last three. so in effect you only have four digits to find. most routers will stop accepting wps "guesses" for an hour when it has received 20 incorrect guesses - but the one hour delays stop when you have the first four digits set correctly.
I have played around with several routers that belong to my friends - i told them what i was doing and was able to get the WPA password by brute forcing the wps code.
switch off wps if you can.
if the above doesnt scare you - certain routers have wps enabled whatever you do - and the wps code cannot be changed.
its a security nightmare.
 
just checked my superhub has wps turned off
 
just checked my supehub has it turned off just don't set WPA2- PSK[AES] or wpa2 auto and wps cannot be used
 
im not saying your wps isnt turned off.
however,
the only way to be SURE that it really is off is to run the "wash" command (which is part of reaver)
from a ubuntu or backtrack linux command prompt.
there are some routers that say wps is off when it isnt.
using reaver and backtrack linux takes perseverance as its NOT SIMPLE to get it all working properly.
there may be windows tools - but im not aware of them.
another really scary thing about all this is that YOU CAN TELL PART of the wps code from the wifi SSID.

even if you dont broadcast the ssid and do mac address filtering a determined hacker can use your wifi.
if you have no wps and a decent WPA password then a hacker CANNOT get use your wifi.
if there is interest im happy to do a "brain dump" of what ive found out about this for folks.
is there any interest?
:)
my expertise is in wps brute forcing with reaver (and WPA with GPU cudu but thats old hat now and wont work with a decent password)
 
Re: re wi-fi

Nice post crazy how some ppl dont know how to lock down there router.
 
Periodically check your wireless router log to see if others are using your connection. If for some reason you can't use a password you should consider modifying the coverage of your WiFi to limit its coverage.

I've replaced the antennas on one of my routers with dummy loads to reduce its coverage and now when I park my car outside my house I can't get a usable signal from the router but it still works inside the house.
 
nice little app Who Is On My WiFi | Wiress Network Security Software works on wired/wireless networks so useful if using mains plugs too, just add each item you have, to the data base, it just looks for new mac/ips given out by dhcp once you have everything on these are the known machines and they can come and go. anything new joins and it squawks like a goodun.
 
Not only do you need to put a password on your wifi but you also need/should change the router access username and password.
 
^ Yea what chris said. Most people don't change their admin pass for the router and allow anybody connected to change the settings.
 
Also a lot use their names D.O.B's etc that's why social engineering works on home routers. A common misconception is that people think that using 20 characters numbers letters etc are hard to access, is not really true as with a man in the middle, arp spoofing forwarding and a bit of sniffing it can be done.
 
Wow 10 year old thread revival, good effort.
 
Back
Top