Router Security - Protect Your Wi-Fi Connection
Many people don’t know how easy it is for people to connect to their wifi and steal their internet and bandwidth. Why sharing your home internet with everyone that is near your house if you don’t want them to?
Well it is quite easy to prevent this from happening, all you have to do is to find the IP of the router, I mean the internal IP of the router, to do this simple connect to the router via a LAN or WAN and then run a command prompt usually referred to as CMD.
If you are running Windows XP just go to Start/Run and write cmd and press enter. If you are running vista press the start menu and in the ‘Start Search’ write cmd and press enter.
Now that you are in the command prompt just write down ipconfig and there you should see your internet connection, either marked as Local Area Network or Wireless Network Connection, and under that you will see some IP’, subnet mask and the default gateway.
Now, the default gateway IP is the IP of your router, or at least it should be. Now open your internet browser and in the address bar write that ip.
Now a login dialog should popup to login, usually it will be admin both for the user and password, if not check your routers manual. If you did login then you should see an easy to navigate website, in the menu search for something like Security, encryption, passkey or wireless settings.
Now there you have various options, search for something like security type, and I would recommend you choose WPA-PSK or WPA2-PSK, choose an encryption type and enter a passkey. Now the router might reboot and you might get disconnected from your WAN, connect again and enter the passkey to connect.
Now only people that know that passkey will be able to share the internet connection, no one else will be able to do that unless illegally cracking it.
Hope this helped to protect your Wireless Internet, Don’t let people steal it freely!!