In this video, I want to show you how
to set up a wireless router using the proper settings.
That means we're going to be doing things like MAC filtering,
setting the broadcast to disabled and putting it at WPA2.
So as we go through,
I'm going to use this wireless N wireless router.
This is a standard wireless router you might find
at Best Buy or Office Depot or someplace like that,
and it's probably what you have something like this at home.
This is a standard model
that's going to have a wireless access point, a router,
and a switch built in.
So as you can see, I have four different ports
plus the WAN connection,
which will connect to my cable modem or my fiber modem.
Now what I'm going to do is switch over into the display
and you'll be able to see my computer
as we go through and configure this device.
So I'm on my desktop computer
and I've opened up my network preferences.
This shows me that I'm currently connected
over ethernet directly to that wireless access point
because it has those four switch ports,
I'm plugged into port number one.
I received a DHCP IP address,
as you can see here, 192.168.1.2,
and the router is 192.168.1.1.
So for me to be able to configure
this wireless access point, I'm going to go
and type in that IP address, that router IP address
into a web browser,
because most of these home access devices are going
to allow you to have a web-based configuration.
So here I go, 192.168.1.1,
and it brings up a NETGEAR Genie,
which is this model of router that I'm using.
So do I want to use the genie to help me?
I'm going to say no, we're going to configure this ourself.
Now currently, I do not have my cable modem
or fiber modem plugged in,
so there will be no connection to the internet.
But I do want to go through
and configure the wireless settings.
So I'm going to start by clicking on Wireless,
and under here, you could see the first thing
that we want to turn off, which is,
Enable SSID Broadcast.
According to the network plus exam
and the security plus exam,
you should disable the SSID broadcast
because this is essentially
your wireless access point going out and saying,
"Hey, hey, I'm over here, connect to me, my name is blank."
We don't want to do that,
so instead we're going to turn that off,
which means that each device in your area,
you're going to have to actually type in the name
of the network for them to connect.
Then do we want to have wireless isolation?
I'm going to say yes.
Now, the reason why is I'm using a wireless N router
in this case.
Wireless N and wireless AC do support wireless isolation.
This allows it to act more like a switch
and less like a hub and that's what we'd like.
So we're going to go ahead and give it a name,
and what is its SSID going to be called?
I'm going to go ahead and call it a DionTestWap, that's fine.
And then it has you select the region.
I'm in North America 'cause I'm in the United States,
and you can either auto select the channel
or specifically select the channel you want based
on 1 through 11 if you're running wireless B or G.
Now, I'm going to let it auto select for me based on
what is in my area,
but if that was a problem, I could always go back
and select one of the three most common channels
that give us that separation,
channel 1, channel 6, or channel 11.
Next, I'm going to look at mode.
And Mode tells me how fast it's going to operate,
am I going to be operating under wireless B or G,
which would be 54,
or can I go up to 150, which would be a mixed mode
between G and N,
or can I go up to 300,
which would give me just a wireless N.
In my case, I do want to have this mixed mode
because maybe I have some older devices
that are still using wireless G, and so we'll do that.
Then we're going to look at our security options.
Are we going to have no security,
meaning no password is needed.
Now, sometimes you may want that.
For example, at our offices we have a wireless network
called Dion Guest.
It has no password,
you can go ahead and connect to it
and it's going to give you a direct connection out
to the internet.
It's isolated and there's nothing touching our network,
it just gives you direct access out.
But if you're setting this up for your home,
you want to have a password
'cause you don't want somebody connecting into it
and then touching your other devices.
So on this particular wireless access point,
it only supports two different types of encryption,
WPA or WPA2.
Notice, WAP isn't here, why is that?
Well, because WAP is easy to crack,
and I'm going to show you that in a separate video,
but for right now, we have to choose between WPA and WPA2.
Do we want WPA with a pre-shared key and using TKIP,
or do we want WPA2 with a pre-shared key using a AES,
or do we want to support both of those,
or do we want to support an Enterprise mode?
Well, if we're a home user, we're probably going to go
for the most secure and easiest to use,
which is WPA2 with a pre-shared key using AES.
And here's where you're going to choose some long passphrase,
and you want it to be something long and complicated,
and maybe it's something like that, I don't know,
or maybe you have it as a long sentence.
Whatever it is, you want to have something
between 8 and 63 characters
and you want it to be long and complex
because that lengthens the time it takes
for somebody to break into it.
So we're going to go ahead and hit Apply
and that'll save those settings.
Now, there wasn't a whole lot
of in-depth settings here, right?
They only gave me very basic things
because they're trying to keep it easy for the consumer.
What I want to do is I want to go to the Advanced tab though
and see if there's any more in-depth settings
that we might be able to use.
So now that I went to Advanced, I'm going to go to Setup
and I'm going to go to Wireless,
and we're going to see what settings we have.
Again, there's not much there.
Now, if I go to Guest Network,
this particular access point allows me
to have two different networks.
I can have one for my personal and one for guests,
and the guests can connect
and go directly out to the internet,
just as in the example I gave you at our business offices.
So maybe you want to do that for your friends,
and you're going to call it a friend guest network,
and you're going to allow isolation
and you're going to enable this guest network
and you're going to allow it to be broadcast.
We're not going to allow guests
to access your local area network though.
We want them to go directly to the internet
and not touch anything inside your network,
and we can go ahead and set that up.
Another thing we might want to do
is we might want to use Mac filtering.
So if I want to enable Mac filtering, I need to find it first,
and I believe it's under Advanced Setup here,
and then we're going to go down here
and find it under Wireless Settings.
And then under Wireless Settings,
they call it Wireless Card Access List.
And if I set up this access list, I can actually turn it on
and only allow certain Mac addresses
to be able to connect to this wireless network.
So the good thing about this is it will keep out people
who don't know you're using Mac filtering,
the bad thing is, as a hacker or an attacker,
it only takes me about 30 seconds
to bypass Mac filtering.
And so really it's a lot of work for you to be able
to keep somebody out for maybe 30 seconds.
But if you wanted to use it, you could go through and do it
and we might say something like, Jason's iPhone
and then his Mac address,
whatever that Mac address happens to be.
And now if I add that, it's going to allow
that wireless network card to be able to connect
to my wireless network and it will prevent everybody else
if I turn access control on.
Now, that's not my real Mac address,
so I'm not going to turn that on,
but that's just an example of what you can do.
The other thing I want you to look at here is WPS,
and WPS is something that was put into routers
to make it easy for people.
It's that button on the front of your wireless router
or wireless access point
that you push the button on your device
and you push the button on the access point
and they'll automatically pair,
share this router pin with each other,
and then connect each other securely to the network.
In theory, this was a great thing,
but unfortunately it was easily hacked,
and so it's something you do want to turn off
for your best security.
You'll notice on my device here,
it doesn't give me the option of turning it off,
and so I'm going to have to dig deep
into the settings to turn this off.
Most likely, it's here under the WPS Wizard
or under the Advanced Settings, and we would go through
and turn off that WPS if you're allowed to by your device.
The last thing I want to talk about here
is your remote management.
If you click on Remote Management, this is something
where it allows you to connect to the device remotely
over the internet
through this web-based graphical interface.
Now, we're doing this locally on 192.168.1.1,
and that's okay because you'd have to be connected
to my network first to be able
to access this device and make these changes.
But if I turned remote management on,
I can actually give it an IP address
and allow anyone on the internet to be able to connect
to this device and make changes.
Now, why would you want to do that?
Maybe you have to set this up for your mother's house
and she's not very technically savvy,
and every time she has a problem,
she's going to call you and ask you to fix it.
So if that was the case, you might want to turn this on,
but you're going to want to configure it
to only allow certain computers
with certain IPs to be able to connect to it.
Again, the best practice here is
to turn off remote management,
and you'll notice it was off by default,
and keep it off to keep your device
the most secure it can be.
So in summary, what are some of the big steps we did?
Well, we wanted to make sure we're using WPA2
with a good long, strong pre-shared key,
we want to disable the SSID broadcast to make it harder
for somebody to find our wireless network,
we'd want to enable wireless isolation to keep those channels
and frequencies isolated from each other,
from people connecting
and make it act more like a switch and less like a hub.
We also want to enable Mac filtering according to the exam,
although honestly, in reality,
I usually don't do MAC filtering
because it's just more of a pain for me,
and it really doesn't give me that much more security.
And finally, we want to disable the WPS setting
if you're able to.
Again, WPS was a great idea for convenience,
but it doesn't provide good security,
and so I would disable that anytime you can.
I hope you take these tips
and you put 'em to work in your own home or office network
and get yourself a little bit more secure.