Technology

A Brief Guide to make your Wifi Secure and Safe from hackers

Your wifi may have a fancy name that is taming others to fiddle with it. The ugly truth is no matter how fancy or simple the name of your wifi is, It can always be hacked and your minutest details may be at risk. Right from your address, private picture to the bank details. There have tons of cases that reveal how nasty hackers are.

No matter how hard you try, you should always assume that you are the next potential target as that’s what is going to trigger you to take some action so that your wifi gets more secure. Below we discuss a few ways which you should be taking so to be more secure

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Change the name of your default home network

This is one major source from where hackers look for a potential target. So you should always be cautious to not piss off any hacker by using names such as “Go away”, “show me if you can” or “can’t hack this”. Your wifi name is called the SSID which means service set identifier. Since the default name of your wifi may reveal the brand of the router which can further ease the process of hacking, so it is always recommended that you change the name of your home network.

Set a unique password to strengthen your wireless network

If a hacker gets to know the brand name of a victim’s router then it becomes peanuts for him to hack it with the default username and password of that particular router.  Every router comes with a default username and password as that’s what is used to do the installation in the first place. For example: To login into Comcast router, you have to visit 10.0.0.1 login ip then enter the following details:

Username: admin

Password: password

So as soon as you get the router, make sure to change the username and password. While choosing the password, ensure that it is long, has alphanumeric characters and has some special characters too. The longer, the better.

Activate Network encryption

When you turn On the hotspot settings on your smartphone, you might have seen certain options such as WEP, WPA or WPA2. They are basically multiple encryption languages. To make it simpler, WEP aka wired equivalent privacy is the oldest of all. WPA aka Wi-Fi protected access is an age older and the latest and also the current industry standard is WPA2. It encrypts traffic on our wifi networks. As we speak, there are already talks of launching WPA3. So it is always recommended that you activate WPA2 encryption on your router.

In your absence, turn off the wireless home network

As a hacker, they are always in the hunt to catch the weakest victim. If you are not at home and if your wifi is always enabled then you have just left a huge window for hackers to keep trying to crack your wifi. It is always recommended that you disable your wifi whenever you are moving out of your home. Turning off leaves no window for hackers to have a peep. You do save a minimal amount of electricity. So as a crux, always make sure to turn off your wireless stations when moving out of the home.

Set a strong network administrator password to increase Wifi security

When we access our wireless router, we are greeted with a login screen. It is a platform that lets you do multiple changes to the network settings. The worst part is that people often forget to rename the username and password which is most cases is “admin” and “password”. In this case, it won’t even require a hacker, any normal person can get through with this. SInce the usage of wifi networks is increasing, the probability of a similar set of credentials is also on the rise. So always remember to change the default username and password for the network administrator.

Change the default IP address on your router

This is a much less used step but an important one. You can consider changing your default IP address to something that’s not so common. It will make it difficult for hackers to intervene. The steps are very simple:

  • Login to your router’s console.
  • Enter your credentials on the login page
  • See the network tab and click on the LAN option
  • Change the IP address to your desired preference and click Save.

Once set, from now onwards you will have to click on the new IP address.

Disable remote access

Remote access means that you can control the user interface of the screen which lets you control and change the network settings. If you have enabled this option then you will be able to fiddle with the changes from any remote device, which also means someone else can also use it and change the settings. It is recommended that you turn off this option. Once done, no hacker would be able to access the privacy settings of your network. To disable, see for the option of remote access or remote administration.

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