Todays world is becoming a wireless one. If you signup for a new internet provider you have most of the time the choice of a modem that uses cables and one that is wireless. Now, most people tend to chose the wireless one because their homes don´t look that messy after all, cables everywhere seems to turn certain people off quite a bit.
Those people normally get the wireless router up and running and forget / don´t know about the security risks involved. If the router is not thoroughly secured others might use it to surf the web itself and do things far worse than that. It´s basically a free connection to the internet (and probably your pc as well).
The informit.com article Home Network Router Security Secrets gives advice how to reduce the security risk. Its 11 chapters address each a certain security risk and give tips on how to avoid or reduce the risk. For example chapter one “Turn off UPnP” advises you to turn of the universal plug and play service.
A Trojan horse or virus on a computer inside your network could use UPnP to open a hole in your router’s firewall to let outsiders in.
If you are using a wireless router make sure you read the article, it´s worth the time.
Related posts:
How to Secure your Wireless NetworkWireless Security: Attacks and Defenses
Netgear WGR614L Open Source Wireless-G Router
UPNP Port Mapper
Protect your Wireless Lan
Network Security Analysis With Network Miner
Wallwatcher firewall and router analyzer
Display all wireless network keys
