Best Practices for residential-grade Wi-Fi routers

The boundary line of one’s home network is extended when the administrator adds a Wi-Fi hot spot to the infrastructure. Since many of the (SOHO’s) Small office Home office incorporate Wi-Fi hot spot, today’s topic will focus on residential-grade Wi-Fi routers and ways to configure its’ security features to make your homes network a little tougher for average unauthorized user to access.

Proper configuration after installation of residential-grade Wi-Fi routers never gets the attention that it deservers and users are usually left with a false sense of security. Here are some best practices to change a default configuration to one that has additional safeguards.

1.     Changing the default network address of the router.

2.     Changing the default password that allows access to the router.

3.     Take away the right to access the router from the Internet.

To gain access to the routers’ software called firmware one has to use a web browser such as Internet explorer, Safari, Firefox, Google chrome, and etc… to enter the routers network address. In its’ default setting, the router uses a address that if a user has the make and model of your router can Google its address to gain access to the firmware. For many manufactures “192.168.1.1” is the default address, so by changing the default network address of the router one can lower the chance of unauthorized access being gained easily. Once you enter your routers address, the authorization process begins. And the router has the user enter a default user name and password to gain full access to the firmware settings for configuration. Step two begins here, as just like step one, if the user has the make and model of our router can Google its default user name and password to gain access to the firmware. For many manufactures  “admin” or “administrator” is the default user name and password, so by changing the default username and password of the router one can allow the manufactures authorization safeguard to work in their benefit. In theory, the administrator can only access and configure the router. At this point, the administrator should take away the right to gain access to the routers firmware through the Internet. The reason this should happen is that it forces anyone who is trying to gain access to the router settings to have physical access to the router for its Ethernet connection.