After reading my reasons to have a router post and rushing out to buy a router, you may need to secure and configure the router. This is especially true if your router has wireless capabilities. Most of the routers that you will find at your local department or electronics store for reasonable prices are plug and play. This means that you can essentially bring them home, take them out of the box, plug them in and not worry about it.

If your router does not have wireless capabilities, this is fine. If the router does have wireless capabilities, it would likely be in your best interest to take some time to configure and secure the router.

The level of security you need to implement on your wireless router varies based on your location and the likelihood of threats in your area. If you live in the middle of nowhere and don’t have any neighbors within range of your router, the likelihood of threats is low and you may not need to implement any security at all. If you live in an apartment complex in a highly populated area, you will want more security measures to keep people from accessing you network and connection. Take a look at your situation and the data you are protecting as well as the likelihood of the people who are in range trying to hack in to your network and take the appropriate measures.

There are many websites available that can be found using your favorite search engine that will walk you through the steps of securing your wireless router. I will not go in to the more secure methods such was WEP and WPA as I have never used these personally.

The safest thing you can do is to turn off the wireless features completely. This may not be such a good thing if you have a computer that you plan to connect wirelessly to your network, but it will eliminate any chance of your network being hacked via your wireless router.

One method that I have used and found sufficient for my needs, as the location of my router does not provide easy access to a large number of people and I am not concerned about a threat from my neighbors, is using MAC Address filtering. MAC Filtering is the easiest for a hacker to overcome when you are using your laptop or other wireless device. However, when that device is not on, the potential attacker would not be able to get in if they did not already have the approved MAC Address.

The best thing for anyone to do is to evaluate his or her situation and use your favorite search engine to determine what type of security is most appropriate for your situation. There is hardly any situation when it is necessary to leave the router at its factory unsecured settings.