Home Wirless network security [noob question]

wd40

Hi All,

Sorry for the long post.

I just purchased my first laptop and a wireless router, I have some security concerns, I did some research but I feel that you guys can give me better ideas.

Setup.

Router: Linksys Compact Wireless-G Broadband Router

PC: Connected through a linksys USB adapter that came with the router
Laptop: Toshiba U500
Printer: HP Photosmart C7200 with built-in wireless
Mobile: Nokia N97

What I did:
Changed the default router name and disabled SSID Broadcast
Have a long admin password
Security mode: WPA2 PSK2-Personal
Encryption: AES
Passphrase: 12 charcters with special characters
key renewal: 3600 seconds
Wireless MAC filter: I wanted to enable this but it seems the router can not detect my printer,the printer works but I can not see it in the clients list, I will check if it will work if I enter it manually.

DHCP is enabled because I'm not sure if I can assign a static IP in my phone, but I set the DHCP address range to 4 clients only.

my pc and laptop has passwords and firewalls installed.

Did I miss any thing?

Thanks for your help

Hyper-Me

WPA2 is fine.

Mac filtering is worthless.

Noone cares what you have on your personal network anyway so its mostly a moot point

dynamik

You can sniff the SSID and MAC addresses even if you have them disabled, so those are providing a very minimal level of security.

12 characters is a bit on the short side. I go to: https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm and copy that to a text file on a thumb drive and then paste it in on all the devices that require it. That sucks if you need to put it into a Wii or something though (which I've done).

wd40

Hyper-Me wrote: »

WPA2 is fine.
Mac filtering is worthless.

Noone cares what you have on your personal network anyway so its mostly a moot point

Thanks for the reply, I know that my data is useless, but I'm a little paranoid "You can never be too careful"

wd40

dynamik wrote: »

You can sniff the SSID and MAC addresses even if you have them disabled, so those are providing a very minimal level of security.

12 characters is a bit on the short side. I go to: https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm and copy that to a text file on a thumb drive and then paste it in on all the devices that require it. That sucks if you need to put it into a Wii or something though (which I've done).

The only other wireless network that we have around is unsecured, so I do not think any body is going to sniff my SSID or MAC addresses

Thanks for the link, I will change the passphrase later

msteinhilber

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Noone cares what you have on your personal network anyway so its mostly a moot point

I agree for the most part, my personal network isn't really going to go very far with any attacker unless they really like pictures of my family, car projects, pets, or videos of my son. Anything important that I keep is kept offline. I don't discount going out of the way with my home WLAN security though. The region I live in has been spending an awful good amount of money (and rightfully so) to catch people affiliated with child pornography. There have been two instances where innocent people with poorly setup wireless networks have fallen victim to police scrutiny because their Internet access had been used in some way to download or distribute child ****. That's my main concern, what someone else could do on my network that gets me in trouble.