Cisco WRV54G - Manual (Page 71)

67 Appendix B: Wireless Security
What Are The Risks?
Wireless-G VPN Broadband Router
There are a few things you can do to make your SSID more secure:
a. Disable Broadcast
b. Make it unique
c. Change it often
Most wireless networking devices will give you the option of broadcasting the SSID. This is a option for
convenience, allowing anyone to log into your wireless network. In this case, however, anyone includes hackers.
So don't broadcast the SSID.
A default SSID is set on your wireless devices by the factory. (The Linksys default SSID is "linksys".) Hackers
know these defaults and can check these against your network. Change your SSID to something unique and not
something related to your company or the networking products you use.
Changing your SSID regularly will force any hacker attempting to gain access to your wireless network to start
looking for that new SSID.
With these three steps in mind, please remember that while SSIDs are good for segmenting networks, they fall
short with regards to security. Hackers can usually find them quite easily.
6) MAC addresses
Enable MAC address filtering if your wireless products allow it. MAC address filtering will allow you to provide
access to only those wireless nodes with certain MAC addresses. This makes it harder for a hacker using a
random MAC address or spoofing (faking) a MAC address.
7) Firewalls
You can use the same firewall technology to protect your wired network from hackers coming in through your
wireless network as you did for the Internet. The firewall will protect your network from any transmissions
entering via your wireless network.
8) WEP
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is often looked upon as a panacea for wireless security concerns. This is
overstating WEP's ability. Again, this can only provide enough security to make a hacker's job more difficult.
WEP encryption implementation was not put in place with the 802.11 standard. This means that there are about
as many methods of WEP encryption as there are providers of wireless networking products. In addition, WEP is