10 steps to keep your home network secured

A normal home wireless network means connecting an Internet access point, such as a cable from your Internet Service Provider, to a (wireless) router in order to allow multiple devices to connect to that network very quickly.

But if you don’t take a few security and privacy steps, cyber criminals can break into your home Wi-Fi network and compromise your data.

The only measure most people use to protect their home network is to set up a password and prevent neighbors from hogging your data. But a more serious risk is that an online criminal might exploit your poor Wi-fi security measures and “listen” to your traffic in order to retrieve sensitive information or take advantage of your network to launch malicious attacks.

Below are few ways of keeping your home network secured:

• Change the name of your home wireless network
• Choose a strong and unique password for your wireless network
• Improve your Wi-Fi security by enabling network encryption
• Disable the wireless network when you’re not at home
• Location of router at home
• A strong network administrator password will boost your Wi-Fi security
• Disable Remote Access
• Keep your router’s software up-to-date
• A firewall can help secure your Wi-fi network
• Protect the devices that connect most frequently to your wireless network.

To sum up, the number of wireless networks has skyrocketed. In 2010 there were 20 million Wi-Fi networks around the globe, and in just 6 years, that number increased 13 times to 260 million. Smartphones, laptops and tablets have driven this growth, and because of how expensive data plans are, most people choose to connect their device through wireless Internet connections.

But the security of wireless networks is notoriously weak, and can allow even inexperienced hackers to break into them. It almost doesn’t matter how strong your password is or if your software is up to date, if cybercriminals can just hijack your Wi-Fi data.