« Previous Post | Blog Home | Next Post »
Protecting Your Online Identity
Posted on Mar 18, 2007 by Tom Fragala
The WSJ has a story titled “Protect your own identity”. It is really about protecting your home network. The tips include:
Pick a better password for your home router.
Turn off the Service Set Identifier (SSID) so people can’t find your wireless LAN.
Enable Media Access Control (MAC) Address Filtering. This means you set your wireless router and firewall so that only computers you specify can access your network. The story didn’t mention that somewhat sophisticated people can get around this by “sniffing” the wireless traffic.
Turn on encryption. This can prevent people from sniffing or snooping on your network. Not all wireless enryption is created equal and some can be broken pretty easily.
Filed under: Identity Theft, Tips
Comments
Tycho on Mar 18, 2007
I'd like to make an addendum to this article. Turning off SSID broadcasting and using MAC filtering will do absolutely nothing to protect you from someone who has even a modicum of networking skills. They only serve to make you obscure, but will not actually protect you.
Only by using WPA/WPA2 encryption with a long (>25 characters) and random passkey will truly afford you protection.
Post a Comment