Wi-Fi networks have made it easier for us to use the internet from wherever we want to on any device such as laptops, mobile phones, tablets, computers without the need for any wire. However, a problem with wireless networks is that if you have not made your wi-fi network secure enough then it will always be susceptible and anyone will be able to steal your bandwidth and also see the data shared on the network. This is the biggest problem that one can have with a wireless network that anyone in your neighborhood will be able to use your internet without you even knowing about it if you haven’t secured your wireless network.
Therefore, you should secure your wireless network if you don’t want anyone to steal your bandwidth. Here are some things that you can do to secure your Wireless Wi-Fi Network:
Setting up a network encryption
The first thing that you should do is enable the network encryption for your wireless network. This will prevent anyone from using your internet connection as your network would be encrypted.
There are several different encryption protocols available such as WEP, WPA, WPA2, WPA3. When you have the choice to pick between the given encryption protocols, then always pick WPA2 or WPA3. WPA3 is modern technology and therefore, found only in modern routers but you would found WPA2 in almost all of the routers, therefore, always pick WPA2 or WPA3 as the encryption protocol for your router.
You can set the encryption protocol for your router from the Wireless Security Settings on the Admin Panel of your router.
Setting up a secure passphrase
The next thing that you should do is create a unique password for your router. When you set up an encryption method then you will also be asked to set up a unique passphrase for the router. When you set up a passphrase then it will prevent anyone to access your router without entering the passphrase.
You should set such a passphrase that is hard to guess and it should consist of letters, digits, and special characters because a passphrase having a combination of all of these is much more secure.
Turning off SSID broadcasting
The next thing that you should do if you are very conscious about the security of your router is to turn off the SSID broadcasting for your router. SSID is basically the name of your wireless network that is available to the devices.
When you turn off SSID broadcasting then your router will no longer broadcast the SSID and your network won’t show up to the devices and no one will be able to know if your network exists or not. This does have a drawback and that is if you were to connect to your wireless network then you will have to manually enter all the details about your router such as the SSID, password, etc, only then will you be able to join the network.
Reducing the range of wireless signals
The next thing that you can do is reduce the range of the wireless signal. If you live in a small room or apartment then you can reduce the range of the wireless signal and there are basically two ways by which you can achieve this.
- You can either change the mode of your wireless router from 802.11n or 802.11b to 802.11g.
- You can also change the frequency band from 2.4 GHz to 5 GHz. 5 GHz frequency band generally covers less area but provides faster speeds than 2.4 GHz.
Enable MAC Filtering
The last thing that you can do to make your wireless network almost impenetrable is turn on the MAC filtering. MAC Filtering is a security method by which you can prevent devices from connecting to your wireless network if their MAC address is not in the list of allowed devices.
Each device has a unique MAC Address and you can make a list of all of your devices, find their MAC addresses and then add them to the MAC address filtering list from the Admin Panel of the router. When you add the MAC Address, whitelist the selected devices so, only those devices will be able to join the network which have their MAC addresses in the list while others will be blocked from joining your Wi-Fi network.