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Your router is one of the most important and most forgotten about electronics in your home. When our Wi-Fi is working great, we normally forget about it and let it do its job without much of a thought. But we shouldn’t just set it and forget it. Our routers need a little maintenance to be as secure as they can possibly be to ensure it protects our personal information. Whether you have Verizon, EarthLink, AT&T, Hughesnet, Frontier, or any other internet service, here are five ways that you can make your Wi-Fi more secure with Password for your family.
1. Lock Your Wi-Fi Network Down
The easiest way to secure your Wi-Fi network is to put a password on it! If you already have one, great! If not, we highly recommend you password protect your Wi-Fi right away. Having a password on your Wi-Fi is the easiest way you can keep unwanted users out and allow only those you want in. While any password is a vast improvement from no password at all, it’s highly recommended to create a password as strong as possible.
2. Make A Strong Password
Like all of your passwords; they need to be extremely hard to guess, but not so difficult that you won’t remember it later. You’ll want to use upper case and lowercase letters with numbers, spaces and special characters. Experts suggest that using a phrase only you would remember with 20 characters is the best. This makes it much more difficult for a hacker to get in and would make a neighbor give up trying to get in entirely.
3. Change Your Password Often
This too is like any other password; you should change your Wi-Fi password on a regular basis. Unfortunately you will have to reconnect all connected devices again, but at the same time it will also kick off anyone who isn’t welcome on your Wi-Fi. Another very important password to change is the default password the manufacturer assigned your router to access the router settings. It may sound inconvenient to go out of your way to change, but anyone who knows what they’re doing can easily look up what the default username and password is and access every setting of your router.
4. Keep The Firmware Up To Date
Good news is most modern routers manufactured within the past couple of years update themselves, so you may not have to worry about this. But no matter what router you decided to go with, it’s best to check to make sure your firmware is indeed up to date. Your router’s firmware which controls everything it does to keep you online. Like other electronic devices, this software is continuously being updated by its manufacture with bug fixes and the most up to date security patches. It sounds boring to most, but it’s actually really important to keep up to date so those with nefarious intentions who know what they’re doing cannot hack into and exploit your router’s weaknesses.
5. Set Up A Guest Wi-Fi Network
Setting up guest Wi-Fi will make everything so much more secure and safer for your network and all the devices connected to it. It will protect your main network from any viruses, malware or worms that your guest could unintentionally spread to every connected device on the network. Creating a guest Wi-Fi network will also allow you to keep a complicated password for your main network, while creating a simpler password that’s easier to share for guests. Plus you can change the password after every visit without having to update all your devices each time.
