How to Secure a Wireless Internet Connection

Video Transcript

"So now we're going to talk about securing a wireless Internet connection. The reason you want to do this is basically to make sure that only you or people you authorize can get onto your wireless network. Pretty obvious why you would want to do that. If nothing else, you don't want your neighbors stealing your bandwidth so they don't have to get their own ISP. Let them pay for their own Internet service. So, the way we go about doing this is you'll need to get into your route, your routers configuration utility. Most wire, most wireless configuration utilities are browser based. Basically you'd go to a specif, you'd be your, you type a web address into your browser and from there you'll be able to access the settings that you need. So in this case, this is a Linksys by Cisco. What we'll need to do is go to the wireless tab. We will want to go to wireless security. Here, in wireless security we have several options. First one's wireless security mode. I recommend you use WPA2. This one you actually have a lot of options. You have personal or enterprise. I would say personal in this case, unless you're setting this up on a corporate level. If you're setting it up on a corporate level, I don't think you need my help, but anyway, you could use WEP. WEP is a very lower lev, it's a much lower level of security. It's more or less considered outdated now. You can use it if you want, but it's fair, it's pretty easy to crack by someone that knows what they're doing, so I would say stay away from it. WPA is stronger then WEP by a significant margin. It's possible to crack that one too, much less likely though. I would go with WPA2 because out of the c, out of the the normal standards for security, it is by far the strongest and hardest to crack, so re, just choose WPA2. Once we choose that, we have to choose what type of encryption. I don't think there's a gigantic difference in which one you use. I usually prefer to go with the WPAT KIP, but either way, you're still going to get a pretty strong level of security. Then you are here. You will set the pass phrase. Pass phrase is what allows a machine to access your wireless network, so you'll want to put in a password here. I recommend you use at least one letter, one number, and maybe throw in a symbol or capital letter as well. If you use something like WEPkey, WEPkey's often use what's called hexadecimal which is basically the numbers zero through nine and the letters A, B, C, D, E, and F. In this case, since we're not using WEP, we don't have to worry about that. We can make a pass phrase rather than using a bunch of hexadecimal numbers and letters. And in this case, we've got both five gigahertz band and two point four gigahertz band, which if you watched the other clip that I did about wireless Internet cards, those are the two common broadcast bandwidths for wireless Internet. So you, in this case, you can actually choose different security settings based on their connection frequency or bandwidth, which is pretty, it's pretty powerful setting. Once you've set these, you'll come down here. Choose save settings and in a lot of cases you'll need to emit, the router will prompt you to wait as it restarts or it may say you'll need to restart the router to save the changes. It's a common thing, it's not true of every single model, but it does happen. So if it does, just go ahead and restart the, restart the unit or wait for it to restart, depending on the mod, the manufacturer and once that's finished, your wireless Internet, or your wireless networking connection should be secure."