Securing a wireless access point

Life Technology
1

hi all,

i currently use mac filtering to block scummers from leeching my bandwidth - is this a reliable method?

i basically found this easier to set up than wep as i have a variety of different devices (laptops, ds lite, etc) using the network and they all seem to have different requirements.

thanks.

2

If you want to secure your access point, you should use WPA encryption with a secure passphrase (more than at least 8 characters; containing no words from any dictionary; containing upper, lower case, numbers and special chars)

WEP encryption is weak and the passphrase can be can be decrypted with a small amount of sniffed traffic. This does not need any knowledge. There are tools for this, that do it automatically.

Restricting your AP to special MAC addresses is not effective either. With the right tools, an attacker can easily sniff your wireless traffic and then adjust his MAC address to one he picked up, and connect to your AP…

Check all your devices, whether they support WPA encryption… If they do, I would suggest setting it up…

Cheers,
Mr. Rice

3

Just use a very high fence. Make sure you build it far enough away from the dvice you intend to protect, beyond radio range: about a kilometre diameter should be fine. That’ll keep them from leaching.

Don’t forget to leave a space so you can get in and out yourself.

4

[quote=“Mr. Rice”]If you want to secure your access point, you should use WPA encryption with a secure passphrase (more than at least 8 characters; containing no words from any dictionary; containing upper, lower case, numbers and special chars)

WEP encryption is weak and the passphrase can be can be decrypted with a small amount of sniffed traffic. This does not need any knowledge. There are tools for this, that do it automatically.

Restricting your AP to special MAC addresses is not effective either. With the right tools, an attacker can easily sniff your wireless traffic and then adjust his MAC address to one he picked up, and connect to your AP…

Check all your devices, whether they support WPA encryption… If they do, I would suggest setting it up…

Cheers,
Mr. Rice[/quote]

I agree with Mr.Rice. Go with WPA instead of WEP, which is very outdated and easily beaten these days. It is also easy to spoof a mac address, but by all means keep using it as well as WPA. Won’t do any harm.

Also, try to have a fairly hard-to-guess admin password on your router.

5

[quote=“JoeyJoJoJnrShabadu”]hi all,

i currently use mac filtering to block scummers from leeching my bandwidth - is this a reliable method?

i basically found this easier to set up than wep as I have a variety of different devices (laptops, ds lite, etc) using the network and they all seem to have different requirements.

thanks.[/quote]

Do you get alot of leechers where you’re at? I’ve been trying to leech here for 2 weeks in Taoyuan at my aunts apt and no one has an AP anywhere. :frowning: Atleast she has the crappy HIBuilding DSL thing.