Tips on securing Wifi Laptop to stop hackers using my connection

jamespir

stick a sign out the window saying touch my net i touch your face youll soon get it sorted

JustPassingBy

anewhope wrote: »

. . . . . . . as it's been demonstrated to be fairly straightforward to break and offers little protection over WEP.

No it hasn't and yes it does.

JustPassingBy

mrdunkleysexy wrote: »

How would I be able to set that up so only my Mums laptop can be connected on wifi to my router please

Use a 63 character WPA/WPA2 passphrase. Then sit back and forget about security for the next million years.

[Deleted User]

JustPassingBy wrote: »

No it hasn't and yes it does.

Yes, it has.

mrdunkleysexy

JustPassingBy wrote: »

Use a 63 character WPA/WPA2 passphrase. Then sit back and forget about security for the next million years.

Im assuming it has to be a memorable password phrase?

63 characters is pretty long

JustPassingBy

anewhope wrote: »

Yes, it has.

Thanks for the link. A typical journalistic headline. Read the paper mentioned in the article; section 4 is interesting. And for some balance:

http://wifinetnews.com/archives/2009/08/new_wpa_exploit_presented_in_paper.html

JustPassingBy

mrdunkleysexy wrote: »

Im assuming it has to be a memorable password phrase?

Could be. Or random. Your choice.

63 characters is pretty long

It's the maximum, I think. You did say you were very concerned about security.

[Deleted User]

JustPassingBy wrote: »

Thanks for the link. A typical journalistic headline. Read the paper mentioned in the article; section 4 is interesting. And for some balance:

http://wifinetnews.com/archives/2009/08/new_wpa_exploit_presented_in_paper.html

There are numerous ways to breach the security provided by WPA, and as I say the majority are relatively straightforward requiring little more than being able to follow a simple set of instructions. If you're sceptical, go try it for yourself on your own kit..

Back on topic, if we agree that the two equally great security risks to a residential wireless set up are having your connection hijacked by somebody, potentially doing something illegal and somebody wishing to acquire your details to commit acts of fraud. In both of those cases anything less than WPA2 in conjunction with AES encryption is not sufficient to provide your set up the level of security it requires.

It's probably equally as important to ensure that the keys used to access are good and strong. Being memorable is nowhere near as important as being secure. Best advice is to use a password generator in something like Keepass or other systems and printing that out and keeping it somewhere safe, rather than using something that you've made up if you're not aware of what constitutes good and bad password practise.

HO87

A "memorable phrase" is pants (pardon my French) as it is susceptible to a dictionary attack. Using a randomly generated phrase using a mixture of character types is far safer.

Working in a street where a lot of students reside means that we have suffered a number of problems in the past as eager-beavers tried out their hacking skills, writing their own packet-sniffers and stealing bandwidth because their landlord had a download limit.

As a consequence we use, WPA2-AES, MAC filtering (still capable of being faked), have given the router an SSID suggesting that it is an entirely different make and model than it is; have changed the admin access identifiers and password and then hidden the SSID (not that that helps enormously either as the transmission is still visible to those with the right kit and the router name is available in each packet in plain text - it just cuts out the idle), and finally a 63-character passphrase. The combination seems to have prevented any recurrence of 9Gb of downloading done through our router one night!

For a decent random 63-character passphrase generator See Here. Each time you refresh the page a new set of passphrases are created.

mrdunkleysexy

JustPassingBy wrote: »

Could be. Or random. Your choice.

It's the maximum, I think. You did say you were very concerned about security.

hi again

Ive give that ago when I get home later

appreciate all your help with this