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Its easy to find a wireless network, you can get it shopping mall,restaurant,coffee outlet,university and even at home. Its obvious that setting up a wireless network cost less than setting up normal network. This widespread use of wireless networks means that there may be dozens of potential network intruders lurking within range of your home or office WLAN. What do I do to secure my wireless network? Here are some of the things you can do to protect your wireless network:


Set Password for your administration interface
All routers and access points have an administrator password that’s needed to log in to modify any configuration settings. Most devices use a weak default password like “123456″ or the manufacturer’s name, and some don’t password at all. As soon as you set up a new WLAN router or access point, first step default password need to be change. Write it down in a safe place so you can refer to it when needed.

Don’t broadcast your SSID
Automatically most WLAN access points and routers broadcast the network’s name, or SSID (Service Set IDentifier) continually. This will make it easy to locate the access point without having to know what it’s called. Turning off SSID broadcast for your network makes it invisible to your neighbors and to anyone.

Enable WPA encryption instead of WEP
WEP (Wired Equivalency Privacy) encryption has a weaknesses that make it easy for a user with the right equipment to crack the encryption and access the wireless network. A better way to protect your WLAN is with WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access). WPA provides much better protection and is also easier to use, since your password characters aren’t limited to 0-9 and A-F. WPA2 now can be found in newer hardware and provides even stronger encryption, but you’ll probably need to download an XP patch in order to use it.

Use MAC filtering for access control
Not like IP addresses, MAC addresses are unique to specific network adapters, by turning on MAC filtering you can limit network access to only your systems . In order to use MAC filtering you need to find the 12-character MAC address of every system that will connect to the network, so it can be inconvenient to set up, especially if you have a lot of wireless clients.

Reduce your WLAN transmitter power
You won’t find this feature on every wireless routers and access points, but some allow you lower the power of your WLAN transmitter and thus reduce the range of the signal. Although it’s usually impossible to fine-tune a signal so precisely that it won’t leak outside your home or business, with some trial-and-error you can often limit how far outside your premises the signal reaches, minimizing the opportunity for outsiders to access your WLAN

Disable remote administration
Most WLAN routers have the ability to be remotely administered through the Internet. You should use this feature only if it lets you define a specific IP address or limited range of addresses that will be able to access the router. It’s best to keep remote administration turned off unless you absolutely need this feature.