I recently visited a friend of mine, Michael Yurencheko, who happens to be large around the current web 2.0 business. He's had much experience with things from reseller hosting to setting up blogs and startups, and thus was naturally decked out with all sorts of gear that made my own tech-senses tingle and longing for more myself. But I digress in this tale.

When I had reached his house, I found him working on programming a less-known brand name TV to work with his remote. He was looking online for instructions on his macbook while trying to get the darned thing to work. I have a thing about boredom and productivity, and so I pulled out my own laptop (Lenovo Y510 IdeaPad, which I'm writining on currently in the pitch dark blackness of my bedroom) and began looking at things to do.

FIrst I looked for a Wi-Fi Access Point. Being located in a townhouse, I was unsuprised to see a plethora of routers I could connect to. What suprised me, however, was the sheer number of routers sitting there, completely unsecured. There were at least 10 in range, and almost 4 of them were on default settings. Michael and I even had some fun with one, activating password authentication routines on one, while adding the password as the SSID Broadcast for that router. We did it for the laughs, but mostly, I did it to send a message to the owner of how unsecure their posessions were. A criminal with malicious intent could potentially connect to their access point under their WAN IP, access illegal content or perform otherwise illegal actions, and all of these would be recorded under that household, not the criminal.

Of course, that's a bit paranoic, but it's certaintly not impossible to happen. This is why certain steps need to be taken to secure your network.

1.) Ensure your router login is not set at the default. All routers come usually with a default login of something along the likes of "admin", password "admin", or simply just "admin" with no password. It's very easy to become a vulnerable target if this is not changed. There are even websites that list complete lists of default passwords by model, so even if you have some cheap no-name brand that you assume no one knows about, information on it could easily be found on Google.

2.) Ensure you have wireless security enabled. Never leave a wireless access point unsecured without a password. Consult your manual or Google for instructions on your model specifics in how tos.

3.) Pick a strong password. No, not your birthday or phone number, you twat. By a strong password, it is usually advised that you have a combination of both alpha and numberic characters. That is to say, a combination of 8-12 UPPER and lower case letters combined with numbers is the best. indubitably, the longer, the better, and the more random, the harder it will be for someone to guess.

4.) Now you have a strong password. Don't leave it lieing around. There are protections to software, hardware intrusions. There is no protection to human negligence and social engineering. Don't leave your password in the open. That means no sticky pads on the side of your monitor showing off your sensitive information to the rest of the world.

Taking careful measures and following these steps, combined with a healthy dose of common sense is what will keep you safe.