super-simple wireless security?

I work for a local ISP providing technical support for broadband customers.

Many of our customers have wireless routers. I'm wondering if anyone has come across a really good online guide to securing wireless routers, that manages to be both brief and include step-by-step directions.

This would be to advise our less than technical subscribers on options like disabling the broadcast of their SSID, and turning on WEP.

Gwen

Reply to
Gwen Morse
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Sounds like something YOUR company should provide - sounds a bit cheap for IT support trawling a newsgroup for 'how-to' info?!

Reply to
__spc__

Problem is that many of the online guides are out of date and give dubious advice even when current.

I realise that you posted examples but in the opinion of many, disabling SSID broadcast does nothing to help security but plenty when everyone in the neighbourhood is on the same channel and nobody thinks there's another AP in range!

Any of the downloadable Linux "security" live distro's let a numpty run kismet (and others) and that will happily show those AP's with SSID broadcast turned off.

WEP is dead, has been for years, is still dead and any advice mentioning WEP with regard to security for data is fundamentally flawed.

WEP is useful only in the context of preventing someone from "accidentally" joining the network.

There are plenty of pretty bored teenagers living next to clueless numpties that have nothing better to do than spend a little time running the tools off the linux live distro's in order to crack their neighbours WEP key.

David.

Reply to
David Taylor
[POSTED TO alt.internet.wireless - REPLY ON USENET PLEASE]

How to Secure Your Wireless Home Network with Windows XP

Reply to
John Navas
[POSTED TO alt.internet.wireless - REPLY ON USENET PLEASE]

p.s.

  • Disabling SSID broadcast *isn't* an effective security tool.
  • Turning on WEP *isn't* an effective security tool.
  • Use WPA with a *strong* passphrase.
Reply to
John Navas

She was doing ok right up until this bit...

"WPA2 uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption instead of the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), which is used by WPA, and is the best encryption available today for wireless networks."

It's not the best, there's better ;)

Reply to
David Taylor

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