Security Tips
First let me introduce myself. I am Josh Roseberry of Greensburg, Indiana. I have lived in this small town my entire life. I made the so wise decision to attend online courses at Phoenix University. Yes I realize Phoenix is not exactly a well respect school. I also realize online courses don't gain a lot of respect either. I spend a good portion of my time studying Information Technology concepts. I am pursuing my Bachelors of Science in Information Technology with a focus on Networking and Telecommunications.
I currently live in a one bedroom apartment complex. This makes wireless security a bit of a concern for me as all my devices are currently wireless. I currently have a Cisco® Lynksys WRT320N Dual Band wireless-n gigabit router. I do use WPA2 security mode yet with a recent firmware upgrade I no longer have the choice to select encryption and authentication protocols. This is a shame because I do prefer TKIP over AES.
I can provide some tips. If you live in a crowded area and are concerned about other people getting into your network through a wireless router do some of these steps. Make sure you use a strong pass phrase. It should be between 8 and 10 characters long and include both upper and lower case letters as well as numbers. To take the security higher through in some special characters as well. Some special characters that are commonly used are $%#@^&.
The next step is to use mac filtering and reservation. On my home network only mac addresses I enter into the wireless mac filter will be allowed wireless access. Adding a DHCP mac reservation for those mac addresses will give you an idea of what is connected to which IP. This takes a bit more setup but is perfect for smaller networks.
While these tips should be common sense to IT experts, not all consumers are aware. I will be back later with some more tips.