Find your WEP, WPA, or WPA2 wireless network password (or key) in Windows, on the router, or from your Internet service provider. IBM WebSphere Portal. To view the network password on a Mac, choose a method to open the Keychain Access application, and then access Passwords. When 'Use Password (WEP)' is selected: The password (WEP) settings are enabled. Confirm the WEP key settings, following 3 below. Click 'Configuration'. Confirm that the entered WEP key is the same as that for access point. Confirm access control (MAC address filtering). Click the 'Access Control' tab.
With everyone recommending WPA2, decided I would check mine and see what I had set up. Have Linksys WRT55AG. Using 'G' only. Was on WEP, the latest firmware for this router does not have WPA2 and verified this with Linksys online support. It does have what they call WPA-Personal. Set this up and after about 2 hours of playing with it, I have full access to the router from my MBP but I have no access to the internet whatsoever. Finally, just changed it back to WEP and no problem. So, guess basic question is for some of ya'll that are much more tech savvy than I, should I worry about it, as in go get a router that has WPA2 or just let it ride?
WEP and WPA security options while connecting to a wireless network
Encryption in a Wi-Fi network
It is possible to 'sniff' data being exchanged on a wireless network. This means that if the wireless network is 'open' (requires no password), a hacker can access any information transferred between a computer and the wireless router. Not having your Wi-Fi network password-protected also creates problems such as an intruder piggy-backing on your Internet connection, thereby slowing it down or even illegally downloading copyrighted content.
Seucring a Wi-Fi network with a password is, therefore, absolutely essential. WEP and WPA are the two security methods supported almost universally by routers and the devices that connect to them, such as computers, printers, phones or tablets. WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) was introduced when the 802.11 standard for Wi-Fi networks was launched. It allows the use of a 64-bit or 128-bit key. However, researchers discovered vulnerabilities in WEP in 2001 and proved that it was possible to break into any WEP network by using a brute-force method to decipher the key. Using WEP is not recommended.
WPA, which stands for Wi-Fi Protected Access, is a newer standard and is much more secure. The first iteration of the WPA protocol used the same cipher (RC4) as WEP but added TKIP (Termporal Key Integrity Protocol) to make it harder to decipher the key. The next version - WPA2 - replaced RC$ with AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and replaced TKIP with CCMP (Counter mode with Cipher block chaining Message authentication code Protocol). This made WPA2 a better and more secure configuration compared with WPA. WPA2 has two flavors - personal and enterprise.
Other Wi-Fi security best practices
Choosing WPA2 is a good start but there are other things you can do to make your Wi-Fi network even more secure. For example,
Do not broadcast SSID: The SSID is the name of the Wi-Fi network. By not broadcasting the SSID, the wireless network becomes 'hidden'. It will still show up in network scans by devices but they would only see it as 'Unidentified Network'. When the network broadcasts its SSID (name), the hacker only has to decipher the password. But when the network name is unknown, logging on to the network will require that the intruder must know not only the password but also the SSID.
Use a strong password: This one is obvious but bears a mention because it is very important. Computers are very powerful and cloud computing has made it very cheap and easy to rent extraordinarily large raw computational power. This makes brute-force attacks possible, where the hacker tries every combination of letters and numbers until the key is deciphered. A good password has the following characteristics:
is longer than 10 characters
uses a healthy mix of characters — upper case, lower case, numbers and special characters like ^*
is not easily guessable, like a birthday, or name of a family member or pet name
Change the default IP address of the router: Virtually all wireless routers are preconfigured to use 192.168.1.1 as the IP address of the router on the network it creates. There are some sophisticated exploits that use this common setting to transmit the infection to the router, thereby compromising not just one computer but all Internet traffic that goes via the router from any device. It is advisable to change the routers IP address to something else, such as 192.168.37.201.