How to protect your home network?

In order to keep your home network secure, follow these tips to protect from anonymous hackers.

By Gizbot Bureau

| Updated: Tuesday, August 29, 2017, 21:02 [IST]

These days, malware attacks are in rising targeting the unsecured IoT endpoint. Remote workers who use their home connection for office at maximum risk of witnessing cyber attacks from hackers.

In fact, not only them, everyone is vulnerable to these malware attacks. You may also want to prevent others from using your network, hackers and freeloaders alike. In order to keep your home network secure, follow these tips to protect from anonymous hackers.

Change the name

First is first! Change the name of your Wi-Fi network, which is also |known as the SSID (Service Set Identifier). Changing name makes it harder for the hackers to know what type of router you use. If the hackers come to know about the manufacturer of your router, they will prey on the vulnerabilities of that model and exploit them.

Strong and unique password

When you a buy a router, it comes with a default password, which is easy to crack for the hackers if they know the maker of that router. So you need to have a good wireless password for twenty characters long and include numbers, letters, and various symbols.

Enable network encryption

Wireless networks come with multiple encryption languages, such as WEP, WPA or WPA2. WEP was first developed in the 1990's, so it's ancient and easy to crack. The best encryption settings to increase your Wi-fi protection is WPA2 AES.

It is also a standard security system now, where all wireless networks are compatible.

Router placement

The placement of the Wi-Fi is important as it plays a key role. It is always recommended to place the wireless router in the middle of your house, where you get same signal strength across the rooms and you won't be having signal range reach too much outside your house.

Disable Remote Access

While most of the routers allow you to access their interface from a connected device, there are some that allow access even from remote systems. This might prove to be an effective way for the hackers to get into your system. Once you disable the remote access, nobody can access your router private setting with the device that is not connected to your network. You can change this by accessing the web interface and search for "Remote access" or "Remote Administration".