Wireless networking can be kind of scary from a security standpoint. It opens up whole new attack vectors that were not present with wired network infrastructures. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it securely, however, and I aim to give you some ideas that can help you in that regard.

Many of these tips are likely to be inapplicable to a lot of people. For instance, if you’re running a wireless network that has to allow connections from a changing lineup of computers so that the specific computers on the network will not be constant, the point about restricting access by MAC address is unlikely to do much good. As always, you must exercise some common sense when reading through a list of security tips like this. You have to determine what options apply to you, and whether the fact that your plans make a given suggestion unusable means your plans are wrong or the suggestion simply is not relevant in your case.

   1. Use a strong password. As I pointed out in the article A little more about passwords, a sufficiently strong password (on a system with decent password protection) makes the likelihood of cracking the password through brute force attacks effectively impossible. Using a sufficiently weak password, on the other hand, almost guarantees that your system will be compromised at some point.
   2. Don’t broadcast your SSID. Serious security crackers who know what they are doing will not be deterred by a hidden SSID — the “name” you give your wireless network. Configuring you