Hi i want to set up a wireless network but how secure is it? if my nextdoor neighbour has the same equipment as me could he/she use my internet connection, share all my files etc? could a hacker pull up in a van in this area and hack into the machines in my house? How secure is wireless networking and what security issues are there? Thanks.

Wireless networking can be both secure and unsecure, depends on how you make it basically you want to use encrpytion which is a feature on all wireless system create a network key, acts as a password... Sign Me Guestbook! jaymc.co.nr

so it's not secure then!? a password to protect my network?

yes, to further that their is also 11 differnt channels you can place your wireless system to run on you will see once you buy your equiptment Regards, Jamie McCoy

The most secure feature is getting the MAC address from all client machine which you are planning to connect to then add them to the access list. That way, only the machine with the mac address on the list will be able to access to your router. Don't worry because no other MAC on the world matchs yours. Goodluck

There are a few number of things you should do to ensure wireless security First WEP (Wired Equivilant Privacy or I call it wireless encryption policy) What this basically does is it encrypts each packet sent by RC4 Cipher stream (an encryption protocol) there are 2 different types of encrypts, 64bit and 128. 128 is the most secure So to do this you have to access your security on ur router. What you do is you put a password in and then it decrypts it into 4 different keys for you. and the keys are what you use. the 2nd thing you should do is what the last post was. Mac Address. Manually add Each Mac address from each computer onto the router and dont allow any others from accessing it. a mac address is a unique address on the nic card ( every piece of hardware equiptment has a different mac address) the 3rd thing you should do is make sure you have a firewall running either on the router or on the computers. And if your going to share your computers . Take off Default admin shares and only allow the certain users of the network to access that folder (ie if a computer 1 and a user billy and computer 2 had a user bob and comptuer 3 had a user charly. and you wanted to share a folder on computer 3. Restrict access to only Administrator. computer1/billy, computer2/bob, and Charly (a local user) Also Frequently check your router and your dhcp status to make sure only your computers are connected to the network

Also, to help with security... Once you have all your computers configured to use the wireless, and it is all running fine, Disable the SSID broadcast. This is the name of your network that is broadcast to the world, also change it from the default. I have a netstumbler kit, wifi at home, and the neighbors do to. From down the block I can see their network, but not mine.