High Speed Wireless Router

How safe to use are wireless routers these days?

Worried about installing a wireless router. How secure are they? Used to be pretty rubbish, how hard is it to use the signal, see what we are browsing or remove contents of the hard drive?

Public Comments

1. With WEP or WPA encryption, it's pretty tough to hack a router. To connect a device to an encrypted router wirelessly, you'd just have to tell the device the wep or wpa password.
2. Yhe important theing is to setup wireless security using WPA or WPA-2 for strongest. Can go with the more common WEP which in most cases is adequate. Just be sure to change the login password for the router as well. Even if someone is able to crack the WEP, they still cannot get into the system without the password. A further check would be to also set up MAC filtering that will only allow listed systems to communicate with teh router.
3. Always change your router IP address that always start with 192.168.1.1. In addition with a good firewall it is pretty safe. Aracelis.
4. How To Crack WEP - Part 1: Setup & Network Recon At this point, you know the basic approach to WEP cracking, have a target WLAN configured and have both sniffing and attack computers configured and working. You also have gained a basic familiarity with Auditor and used Kismet to find in-range wireless LANs. In Part 2, we will use the second notebook to stimulate the target LAN to generate wireless traffic that we will capture and perform the actual WEP key crack. Until then, you can familiarize yourself with Kismet, go WLAN hunting and explore some of the other tools on the Auditor CD. http://www.tomsguide.com/us/how-to-crack-wep,review-451.html quite easy I think
5. Wireless routers have never been rubbish, only the people that never secured them were rubbish. The overwhemling majority of people simply used the default login name/password and never turned on encryption making it simple for anyone going by to use their signal. Most people today still don't secure their connection, though it's better than it was. Turning on encryption and using a semi-complex password would deter 99.9% of people that may attempt to infiltrate your network. WPA or, preferably, WPA2 is a very secure wireless encryption method. Enabling this along with using a password at least 8 characters long, utilizing upper and lower case letters, numbers and a special character (i.e. !#$%&). Also, you can further secure the wireless network by using static IP address and limiting the allowed IP's, on the router, to the ones you've assigned. If your laptop or WiFi enabled device picks up the signal there shouldn't be any trouble using the network, presuming you don't forget the password. No one should be able to browse or touch the contents of any PC's on the network if they are not sharing folders with other endpoints on the network.