- Dec 30, 2012
- 4,809
Protecting your family’s digital assets used to be easy. You just turned on your PC’s built-in firewall settings and turned on an antivirus program. As long as you didn’t install strange software or do anything stupid, you were usually OK.
Times have changed. Now you can get infected just by visiting a compromised website. Organized gangs of cybercriminals are trying to break into your bank account, steal your identity, or take control of your home network to send spam and launch attacks against other machines.
Read: 5 Ways to Make Your WiFi Network Safer, Faster, and More Reliable
And instead of just one machine to protect, you might have a dozen — including mobile phones, game consoles, streaming video boxes, and smart appliances — all vulnerable to attack. Just like a big, juicy corporate network. In fact, as big companies make their networks harder to break into, cybercrooks are moving to home networks, says Michael Kaiser, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance.
“Every family needs its own chief security officer, someone who spends time thinking about all the digital components in their lives and what they’re doing to secure them,” says Kaiser, whose organization operates the Stay Safe Online Web portal and sponsors National Cyber Security Awareness Month each October.
Odds are that someone is you. There are several things you can do to persuade the bad guys to move on to easier targets. It starts with the gateway to most of the digital devices in your home: your wireless router.
1. Fortify your WiFi.Hopefully, by now you’ve changed the default log-in name and passwords for your WiFi router and turned on WPA or WPA2 encryption. (If not, do it now — I’ll wait.) Instructions for each router vary; your best option is to visit the manufacturer’s support site to find out how.
Read More:
Times have changed. Now you can get infected just by visiting a compromised website. Organized gangs of cybercriminals are trying to break into your bank account, steal your identity, or take control of your home network to send spam and launch attacks against other machines.
Read: 5 Ways to Make Your WiFi Network Safer, Faster, and More Reliable
And instead of just one machine to protect, you might have a dozen — including mobile phones, game consoles, streaming video boxes, and smart appliances — all vulnerable to attack. Just like a big, juicy corporate network. In fact, as big companies make their networks harder to break into, cybercrooks are moving to home networks, says Michael Kaiser, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance.
“Every family needs its own chief security officer, someone who spends time thinking about all the digital components in their lives and what they’re doing to secure them,” says Kaiser, whose organization operates the Stay Safe Online Web portal and sponsors National Cyber Security Awareness Month each October.
Odds are that someone is you. There are several things you can do to persuade the bad guys to move on to easier targets. It starts with the gateway to most of the digital devices in your home: your wireless router.
1. Fortify your WiFi.Hopefully, by now you’ve changed the default log-in name and passwords for your WiFi router and turned on WPA or WPA2 encryption. (If not, do it now — I’ll wait.) Instructions for each router vary; your best option is to visit the manufacturer’s support site to find out how.
Read More:
