Is your wireless router secure? Have you ever thought about it?

taxi97w

RussJK wrote: »

There have been people in this forum who have had their quotas used up by having unsecured wireless, and were hit with stiff bills which had to be sorted out.

Now imagine if someone used your connection to access illegal content, so that it would be traced to you instead of them. Imagine the damage to your reputation if you were investigated for accessing child pornography for instance. Could be messy, and you wouldn't see your hard drive for months as it sat in some crimelab somewhere.

Thankfully, that what's in bold doesn't happen in NL. It's a diabolical set up- similar to saying 'We're charging you for breathing air and if you breath more than Xcm³ of air, your gonna get billed big time'. F me, it's not their effin air. And I can't believe nearly everyone goes along with this robbery.
The thief is not me, btw. :eek:

TimothyEBaldwin

JustPassingBy wrote: »

Those devices are known to be on a public network. The wireless access points we are talking about are known to be on private networks.

The access points are clearly connectable to using a public resource, they use unlicensed radio spectrum with sufficient range to be accessible from public land.

There is one significant difference though, wi-fi connections are typically manual configured to use a specific SSID.

JustPassingBy

TimothyEBaldwin wrote: »

The access points are clearly connectable to using a public resource, . . . . .

A wireless access point is on the LAN side of a network. The network is a private one and, while it may be connectable to the internet, there is no reason why it should have such connectivity. Even it is connected it does not mean the network becomes public.

. . . . .they use unlicensed radio spectrum with sufficient range to be accessible from public land.

The open door of a house uses an unlicensed portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with sufficient range to be visible from public land. Thankfully most people do not take it as an invitation to enter and make themselves at home.

MrsE_2

RussJK wrote: »

There have been people in this forum who have had their quotas used up by having unsecured wireless, and were hit with stiff bills which had to be sorted out.

Now imagine if someone used your connection to access illegal content, so that it would be traced to you instead of them. Imagine the damage to your reputation if you were investigated for accessing child pornography for instance. Could be messy, and you wouldn't see your hard drive for months as it sat in some crimelab somewhere.

I can't even remember how to get into mine, to put security on it.

Can anyone help?

Its a netgear, its got 1s & 8s, you type numbers & dots in & it comes up.

spannerzone

Open a web browser, most Netgears you type in to the address bar: http://192.168.0.1 or click that link I just made (don't use www!) and it should popup asking for username and password which as usually 'admin' and 'password'

Then you can change all sorts of things.

More here

Rikki

I have had a WPA code for my netgear router for ages and want to change to a more secure WPA-2. Help needed. Where do I get a new code and how do I go about it?

Just checked my router settings and it seems I don't have a WPA2 option.

Security Options Disable
WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy)
WPA-PSK (Wi-Fi Protected Access Pre-Shared Key)
WPA-802.1x

Anything else I can do?

JustPassingBy

Rikki wrote: »

I have had a WPA code for my netgear router for ages and want to change to a more secure WPA-2. Help needed. Where do I get a new code and how do I go about it?

You provide a code (a password) yourself. WPA-PSK with AES encryption and a decent password is no less secure than WPA-2.

balt

Mr_Oink wrote: »

A 'shields up' test will show you any obvious port open issues - but the type of scan it does is limited and on my own test box, where I have a well know port open, it passes :-(, so don't trust it entirely.

All open ports need investigation, but if you find 21,23,80,135 or 139 open I'd say you need to deal with it as a near emergency.

Apologies for the long, boring post - I hope it is helpful to someone. This concentrates on the OUTSIDE looking in (or remote attacks). I've not even started on internal users and how dangerous they can be!

I have port 21 closed instead of stealth how do I change this?