How To Secure Your Linksys Wireless Network

With technology so integrated into our lives everyone is using the internet so its important to protect your wireless network from intruders. This becomes even more prevalent if you are thinking about or have already added a wireless network extender or repeater as you will potentially be making your network viewable to many more people. So its important to take measures to keep you network secure and, in this article I will be going over several methods to increase the security of your Wireless Linksys Network.

The very first thing you need to do is make sure that you change and set a strong password to you Linksys administration panel. Linksys routers come with the default username "admin" and default password "password". To change your password you need to:

1. Access your administration panel by visiting http://192.168.1.1 in Internet Explorer.
2. Click on "Administration".
3. Enter in a secure password. (If you need help creating a secure password you can use our password generator.)
4. Click "Save Settings" and you are done.


Now that your routers administration panel is secure you need to secure access to your wireless network. To do this you need to enable WPA encrypton or Wi-Fi Protected Access. WPA is stronger then WEP as WEP has well known weaknesses that make it relativley easy for knowledgable users to crack the encrypton and access your network. WPA also does not limit your password characters allowing you to use more secure passwords. To enable WPA encryption:

1. Click on "Wireless" and then "Wireless Security".
2. Select WPA from the drop down list.
3. Enter in a secure password in the "WPA Shared Key" field. (If you need help creating a secure password you can use our password generator.)
4. Click save. Now when ever you access your wireless network you will need to enter in this password or "shared key".


At this point you have secured access to your routers administration and access to your wireless network. However there are still other things you can do to increase your networks security. These things are not necessary and can add complications to the use of your network so you will need to decide for your individual situation.

To further increase the security of your Linksys Wireless Network you can enable MAC filtering. Each individual computer has a unique MAC address and by enabling this you can prevent every computer that you have not enabled from connecting to your network.To do this you first need to get the MAC address of each computer you want to give access:

1. Click "Start" and then "Run".
2. Type in "cmd" and hit enter.
3. In the new window that pops up you will need to type "ipconfig /all" and hit enter.
4. You will then see a list, where you will need to find "Physical Address" which is the MAC address you need.
5. Go to your Linksys Administration and click "Wireless" and then click "Wireless MAC Filter".
6. On this new page you need to tick "Enable" and "Permit Only".
7. Click "Edit MAC Filter List" and in the the window that pops up you can now list each MAC address that you want to allow access to your network.
8. Click "Save Settings" on each page and you are done.


Another thing you can do to increase the security on your Linksys router is to disable the broadcast of your SSID. The SSID is your wireless networks name or id that anyone in range of your network will see. By turning off the broadcast of your SSID your network will be invisible. To disable the broadcast on your Linksys router you need to:

1. Go to your Linksys Administration.
2. Click "Wireless".
3. Tick disable "Wireless SSID Broadcast".
4. Click "Save Settings".

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