How Can I Make My Home or Office Wireless Router More Secure?

Making sure your home and office wireless network is secure is essential, especially if you do sensitive work online. The last thing you want in this day and age is a stranger connected to your wireless router snooping on any sensitive information you may be working on. Also, it's important to maintain your router as it acts as a firewall, protecting you from the many threats that are lurking online. It's hard to cover all of the settings for every brand of router in a short blog post, but I can share the basic settings you need to change to improve your home network's security using router settings.

1. Change the Router Login Credentials. Most routers have administrative credentials that allow you to log into your router to change settings that work best for your environment. This includes turning on or off the firewall, monitoring who's connected to your wireless network, and updating the firmware (software) for your router. For most brands of routers, you can Google the default username and password. When you don't change the administrative settings for your router, it allows anyone connected to your wireless network to go in and change settings. You can log into the settings of your router to change these settings. It's okay to leave your username as admin, but you really need to change the password.