Nowadays, there are no homes and office network is secure. Inn order to counter the hacking efforts of hackers, look for good built-in security functionality. These will ensure that your system doesn’t slow down, those within the range of your wireless are not able to view your files, emails, instant messages, usernames and passwords. Depending on the security features you can also block spams, illegal activities with your internet connection and prevent loading of dangerous software.

This however doesn’t mean your network is completely secure. Some steps that can be taken are:

Enable WEP

Wired equivalent privacy encryption provides security to WLANS. The WEP keys encrypt the data stream.

Turning on WPA encryption.

The Wi-Fi protected access adds on the authentication and encryption features WEP explained above.

TKIP

Temporal Key Integrity Protocol covers up for the encryption weaknesses of WEP.

WPA2 protection is the latest one and provides high level of protection. Enable wireless MAC Address filtering.

WEP Encryption length

The WEP encryption is based on a combination of secret user keys and system generated values. The key encrypts and de-encrypts the data that is transferred between the access points and the clients. There are two versions:

1. The earlier version supported 40-bit encryption; the key length was 40 bits and 24 additional bits of system generated data, thus a total of 64 bits. Easy decoding of 40 bit

2. WEP encryption encouraged vendors to go in for 128-bit encryption. 128-bit encryption has a key length of 104 bits.