Wireless networks are very present in the daily life of users when browsing the Internet. We have at our disposal a wide range of possibilities to connect from anywhere. Now, a very important factor is going to be security. It is not enough just to have a password, as we will see. In this article we explain the importance of using correct encryption to protect our Wi-Fi .
Wi-Fi networks must be properly protected
As we say, security is a very important factor to avoid problems when using wireless networks . If we connect to an insecure connection, we could put our privacy at risk and also allow intruders to enter. This would also affect performance, the way we can browse the Internet, speed and quality.
Therefore, our advice is to always take time to properly configure our router to avoid possible vulnerabilities . The objective is to prevent the entry of possible intruders that could compromise our privacy.
However, in many cases, users do not protect the device correctly. They may use the wrong configuration and despite having passwords they could be exploited by attackers.
Use the correct encryption to protect Wi-Fi
We all know the importance of having a password to access a wireless network. Today there are few that we find open, much less in private homes. We want to prevent anyone from accessing our network without any kind of barrier.
This could affect both our security and privacy and obviously performance. If we have a limited internet connection, having intruders inside could slow down a lot, affect quality and cause outages.
But as we have mentioned, it is not enough just to use any password, but we must make use of a correct encryption. Wi-Fi networks today allow us to use different types of encryption that protect us. But of course, all of them are not equally safe and some are even very easy to break and our networks could be exposed.
Surely when configuring a key for Wi-Fi we have seen that an option appears to choose the type of encryption. We see that there are several options and sometimes less expert users can get lost and end up choosing any of them. This is a mistake, since as we have mentioned, not everyone will protect the same.
In the same way that we must use passwords that are strong and secure , that contain letters (upper and lower case), numbers and other symbols, that are totally random and that we are not using elsewhere, it will also be essential to know what encryption Wi- Fi choose.
Do we use the appropriate Wi-Fi encryption?
As we have indicated there are several different ones. We can see that there is the WEP, WPA, WPA2 … and even within each option we will have some variants. But of course, some have become obsolete and intruders with the appropriate knowledge and tools could access the network.
In this sense, we can say that it is an error to use WEP and WPA encryption . They are old, obsolete and there are numerous tools on the Internet that we can use to try to obtain the key. We would not have properly protected our network if we are using them.
There are different variants like WEP 64, WEP 128, WPA-PSK (TKIP) or WPA-PSK (AES). None of them is really safe today, since they are protocols that are outdated.
We can also find WPA2 encryptions, which are the most used today. They are the ones that we should have in our wireless networks to not have any type of risk. Now even in this case we have several options and not all of them are correct.
We can use WPA2-PSK (TPIK) and WPA2-PSK (AES) . The first one is not the most indicated, since TPIK is unsubscribed from the WiFi Alliance and new routers should not have it. This makes WPA-PSK (AES) the most secure option today.
In short, as we have seen there are different types of Wi-Fi encryption. It is important that we choose correctly which one we are going to use to avoid security problems.
