We all (or practically all) have WiFi at home and we use it every day. At home, at the office, at your parents’ house. We all connect to a WiFi network but security is not always the best, putting our personal data at risk or allowing intruders to connect to our network without permission. But we can avoid this by following a series of basic security tips and from Lowi they collect a series of tricks and fundamental options.
Although the technician will generally be in charge of configuring your WiFi network in the best possible way, we should know what we should pay attention to and what is important in terms of security and privacy in the wireless network . And there are a number of aspects, as explained by the Lowi operator, which are essential.
Set the password correctly
It is essential that our WiFi connection has a secure, robust password and that it moves away from the usual and easy passwords that we all use in some cases. No 123456 or obvious keys. It is always advisable that the WiFi password (like any other website or device) use letters and numbers and other types of characters as symbols. You can use both upper and lower case letters and it is recommended that they be long and have at least eight characters in total and that they be varied and not obvious or easily guessable.
We can modify the password of the router from its software and it will depend on the operator you have or the model of the device, but the route that we must follow is practically the same always:
- We access the computer browser
- We go to the address bar and write 192.168.1.1
- We will enter the router software
- You must use your username and password
We will find this on the back sticker of the router or there is a series of default passwords and users depending on the operator we have
- We access the router settings
- We look for the security and privacy section
- We look for the WiFi network to which we want to change the password
- We modify the name and password of the same
It will depend on the operator that there are more options or on the router itself. It is possible that there is an application from which to manage it, but this is always the route that you must follow regardless of the brand or model you have at home.
Choose the security protocol
But the password is not only important, it is also the security protocol that our router has. There are different security protocols and some of them are no longer used because they are outdated. At first, WiFi networks were protected by the WEP standard, ‘Wired Equivalent Privacy‘ , which despite its name proved to be far from providing the security of a wired network. With specific software, and in just two minutes, it was easy to bypass this WiFi network protection system. Then WPA arrived, and if its first version only lasted a year, it was also quickly shown that it was not secure, or not as secure as it was claimed.
It is most advisable that your router is configured with WPA2 or WPA3. This new version was created to correct the flaws and deficiencies of the WPA system and was released in 2004, barely a year after the system it evolved from. It uses the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption algorithm and is suitable for both the private and public sectors. Its progress implies greater security when accessing data , either through a password or through access to a server. This system was in force for more than a decade, but in the end a vulnerability was found and an evolution was created, WPA3.
WPA3 is a security protocol that strengthens encryption to prevent malicious access to a person’s data when they are using a WiFi network. And it does so using 192-bit encryption compared to the 128 of its predecessors, making it more difficult to bypass that encryption chain and access the data that you want to protect. It protects weak passwords better, because it is less vulnerable to a brute force attack. This is the current protocol, increasingly implemented, and the one that offers greater robustness against attacks and data theft attempts.
Check possible intruders
Beyond configuring this, we can periodically review the devices that are connected to our network to avoid possible intruders that are connected to the home WiFi network. This is simple and does not require technical knowledge; we would only need an application on our mobile phone and an Internet connection. The application that can help us in these cases is Fing and it is compatible with Android and iOS. We download it to the phone and we will see all the devices that are connected to your network, as well as the corresponding IP of each of them…
Seeing the type of device, the brand or the model, it is easy to know if there is someone who is stealing the Internet from us because there is something that does not sound familiar to you: a vacuum cleaner that you do not have, a computer of a brand that is not at home, etc. In addition, you can block access to that specific device.
