5 Ways to Secure Your Wireless Router

Wi-Fi routers can give you enough headaches without worrying if someone is leeching off your connection. You pay for that bandwidth you receive every month, and with so many movies to stream, games to play, and work to remotely connect to, you don't want to share your Internet pipe.

Not only can having others access your router slow down your connection, but there is the possibility they might get you into some legal entanglements. An incident made news least year in which a man was falsely arrested in child pornography charges. The guilty party was actually a neighboring bandwidth parasite neighbor using the innocent man's connection to download the odious content:http://www.geek.com/articles/news/man-wrongly-accused-of-child-porn-learns-to-password-protect-wifi-the-hard-way-20110426/

While a false arrest is an extreme case, having unauthorized users can cause performance issues and pose a security risk. Here are a few ways to keep leeches off your router.

Password encryption should be well-known to anyone with a wireless router. Never leave your router open without a password, and there are very few reasons for the average home and small business user to not encrypt wireless signal with WPA2 security.

Turn off broadcasting is a feature available in just about all routers. For example, you name your network "Jane's Wi-Fi." You know what the wireless name is (also called SSID), so you can easily enter the SSID into any devices you want to access that network. Other people, however, do not need to know the SSID. To prevent outsiders from seeing your network's name turn off broadcasting in your router's settings. This capability is typically found within the wireless router settings page in the router's management software. In the below image the "Enable SSID Broadcast" option would be unchecked, so that your network's name does not show up in other people's wireless network scans.