Wi-Fi networks are essential to everyday life today, indeed, you are probably reading this thanks in part to being connected to one of these networks, either from a private or public Wi-Fi network (we hope it is private because public ones are not very secure) however, there are malicious people who may try to access the private Wi-Fi network, for example the one you have at home, with all the risks that this entails, to prevent them from succeeding, in this article we will see some security tips that you can apply to improve the security of your Wi-Fi network.
Change the default password
Many users leave the password of their Wi-Fi network by default, this is a mistake, it happens that many of these passwords are in dictionaries that can be used by cybercriminals to try to access your network, then, change the password for a more robust and secure one.
Change the default SSID
The SSID is basically the name of the Wi-Fi network, SSID stands for Service Set Identifier, and many providers usually leave their signature in the SSID, so don’t give cybercriminals any clues as to which company you use, so change your network name to one that does not give any clues as to which internet provider you are using.
Uses the latest security protocol
When users connect to your Wi-Fi network a handshake is generated, in a few words this is done to check that the password that was entered is correct and that access to the network in question is allowed and to configure the encryption that will have the communication between the device that has just connected to the network and the wireless access point, what happens with this is that just this initial communication between a device and the wireless access point, It is therefore important that your network uses the WPA3 protocol. It is not advisable to use protocols such as WEP, WPA or WPA2 today because WPA3 is the most current protocol and, although it is not 100% secure (because 100% security does not exist), it will protect your network much more than the previous ones or than not having it.
Enable MAC filtering
At this point, these tips that we will see from now on are much more restrictive, in this case we start with a MAC (Media Access Control) filtering, MAC addresses are addresses that uniquely identify each network interface, if your PC has two network interfaces, you will have two MAC addresses, it is a common mistake to associate a MAC address to a device, It is not really the device as such that has it, it is the network interface, but well, by doing a MAC filtering, you can indicate to the Wi-Fi network only the authorized addresses, this will cause that if you allow only three MAC addresses, only the devices that have the network interfaces with those addresses, will be able to access, so, the security increases a lot.
Hide SSID
Before we saw that it is advisable to change the SSID of your Wi-Fi network, well, another security measure is directly hide it and, if someone searches with your device Wi-Fi networks nearby, they can not see yours, this is very interesting in terms of security, although it can cause problems in terms of the ease with which authorized users connect to the network because they should manually enter the network name and password to access it.
Finally, you must understand that as we have told you many times, 100% security does not exist, but it is your duty to add as many layers of security as possible to your assets to protect your information, actually for a Wi-Fi network, as long as you keep the router software up to date and use a very secure password, it should be enough to have an acceptable level of security, however, you can try the other tips we have given you to add more layers and further protect your information.
