Let me guess what your wireless security settings are...

I've just bought the cheapest wireless router I could find to share my hotel broadband connection with my room-mates.

Note: The Internet access is covered in the room rate and we are allowed to share it.

Against my better judgment I ran the software that came with the router to configure it. What a nightmare. Having followed the dumb wizard I had a router with an administrator account named "admin" and no password!

ANYONE (within range) could administer my router by browsing to https://192.168.0.1 using the credentials I mentioned earlier.

Make sure your router is not set this way!

I've recorded  a series of 2 minute videos showing so how to Secure your wireless network as follows:

How to secure a wireless network: Part 1 of 5 - Enabling WPA on a wireless router

How to secure a wireless network: Part 2 of 5 - How to change the SSID

How to secure a wireless network: Part 3 of 5 - Reconfiguring a Vista client to connect to your WPA secured access point

How to secure a wireless network: Part 4 of 5 Connect using WPA for the first time on Windows Vista

How to secure a wireless network: Part 5 of 5 - Connecting using WPA for the first time on XP

There's an additional blogcast that you may find interesting too titled How to secure a wireless network: How to view the advanced wireless interface on Windows Vista

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  PingBack from http://interesting-videos.thegeekyblog.com/2008/02/19/let-me-guess-what-your-wireless-security-settings-are/

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  thanks Nik

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  John> You can absolutely control which wireless networks your users can connect machines to via group policy - both on a standalone machine and domain joined. I'll write a detailed post on the subject.

• Anonymous
  February 19, 2008
  Interested readers might also like to have a look at http://www.gnucitizen.org/, where there's some good descriptions of bypassing some products' poor authentication even after you set a strong password... The BT Home Hub being a particularly nice example!

• Anonymous
  March 26, 2008
  This is all good stuff, but there seems to be at least one glaring ommission in Vista and XP wireless config. I just cannot see any way of restricting connection to preferred SSIDs and totally preventing manual connection to other networks. Am I missing something ? We want our users to have wireless in our buildings but never get anywhere near public hotspots.