Wireless Network Diagram

How To Secure Your Wireless Network

Wireless technologies are evolving day by day. They are popular with organizations and individuals alike. These wireless systems are extremely useful as they allow the user to move freely and stay connected without the hassles of cables. People can carry their laptops just anywhere and can work on them within the range of their wireless network.

However, a more important issue attached with this kind of system is that of the network security. Wireless signals can easily be detected by anyone. This might result in hacking of important private information that was not meant to be disclosed. People who crack these wireless signals are called Crackers. They find cracking wireless signals a game.

The question that comes in the picture now is- how to secure wireless network from crackers who access a private network's information and use it illegally. The first step to solve this security issue is to identify the facts that might risk the security of the network. These risk facts are usually associated with the wireless protocols, methods of encryption used, and carelessness of the corporates and users at IT level.

A cracker exploits all these weaknesses in a network system. Most companies who do not have wireless access points installed within the organization, do not feel they have cause to worry about their network being invaded.

For example, an employee who works on a laptop enabled with wireless and connected to the wired network of his organization can become can be an easy target for a cracker in a nearby area. The cracker can enter the company's wired network through the wireless-enabled laptop.

If this is the risk faced by a wired network, imagine the number of security threats a wireless network faces on a regular basis. Wireless network security, therefore, becomes a major concern in today's context.

There are several other unauthorized ways to access an organization's wireless network: they might get accessed accidentally, it might be a malicious effort where a cracker makes a device to hack a network, through ad-hoc networks that do not have access points between wireless computers like peer to peer networks, from non-traditional networks like Bluetooth, network injections, and many more methods.

The best way to secure a wireless network is to combine a number of security measures and then apply them to the network. Protecting wireless networks from getting cracked involve three steps:

* Secure the devices that install the wireless network. * Users of wireless network technology need to be educated on wireless security. * All the wireless networks in use need to be monitored constantly for any kind of intrusions or thefts.

Measures to provide security to these wireless networks are: * Employing Mac ID filtering. This technology allows access of the wireless network to only those machines that are authorized to access them. The rest cannot do that.

* Using encryption stands like WEP that stands for Wired Equivalence Privacy. This standard makes an attempt to provide a wireless network as much security as the wired one.

* WAP and WAP 2 standards also provide security to the network and are more advanced than WEP standard.

* Using LEAP, which is a Lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol that uses WEP and a sophisticated key management system combination for wireless network protection.

In addition to the above, there are several other ways available for ensuring a secure wireless network. All you have to do is apply them to your wireless network.

I hope, how to secure wireless network, is not a difficult question to you anymore.