It's quite obvious that everyone wants to know why every wireless communication used for either an enterprise or a home should be secured, but few of them actually know how to implement wireless security. Do you know the amount of data stored on your computer either at home or at work which needs security from any form of wireless intrusion? Securing these resources today is of primary concern. Here are some rough ideas or procedure. There are those who could tell the exact procedure of securing wireless communication that various wireless vendors have depending upon different functionalities for their wireless hardware running with different mechanism and configurations. Anyway general wireless network security concerns are described as follows:

Using Encryption

Generally all wireless access point uses different built in encryption mechanism. That is the most important step to look over in order to secure your wireless network communications from any kind of attacks. WEP encryption methods are used by older access points while newer access points give two choices i.e., WEP and WPA. People prefer WPA more than WEP for the wireless network performance. It's possible to recover the original information from the ciphered data if someone is able to sneak away with large proportion of data-chunk, which can only happen in a WEP communication. Yet it takes many tried for an intruder to read through the data to come out with a string to compromise a server or workstation.

It's always recommended to upgrade to the hardware which offers WPA support if the current older hardware doesn't support. Go for WEP encryption only if you do not have enough budgets for WPA encryption. That's true WEP is already flawed, but then, something is better than nothing. WEP could be better than no encryption. Because WEP can be hacked easily than WPA only if a hacker sniffs packets to understand the encryption type being WEP or WPA. If they found out you're using WEP, they would love to attack the network or workstation at will. They will definitely choose an easier one as their target. Obviously no one wants to be hacked. So just try to go for better encryption method.

The only other drawback to using encryption on your access point is that it can be a little complicated to set up if you aren't the technical type. If you can't figure out how to set up wireless encryption, then invite the neighborhood nerd over for dinner and have them enable encryption. Do what ever you have to do, but get encryption enabled as it will be the encryption that would protect your network or home computer from getting hacked by others. Consider it to be the only and most powerful tool for every wireless network security. It's not easy to setup for non-technical people. That is not a big problem actually. You can ask your friend for help. Your friends may already have encrypted their network. Or it won't be too expensive to hire a technician even if you don't have anyone who knows how to encrypt your network.

Don't Announce Yourself

A Wi-Fi access point announces them using a mechanism which is called Identifier broadcasting. Be careful at this point. You should disable that for the security of your network. You already have the information about your wireless network; therefore you don't need them to announce it to you. It only helps the hackers. They can use it as a benefit. All wireless access points do not have facility to disable identifier broadcasting but if your have then go, disable that. Wireless access points are assigned with SSID or ESSID. When you are going to disable to identifier broadcasting you should also alter your SSID or ESSID. You do not want to have an out of a box name that's why you need to change the SSID or ESSID. Each access point have already assigned SSID or ESSID by the manufacturers same to the assembly line. What hackers generally try after looking for the broadcasting is to attach the access points using default ESSID and SSID because it's not hard to find out that there is an access point in your workplace. And it works sometimes for them. They can do that even if the access points are not broadcasting SSID or ESSID.

Each access point has default passwords. It's important for you to alter the default password of access point just like the SSID and ESSID. Hackers can use the default password of the access points to hack your network. That is why changing the default password is very important. If hackers take control of your access points them they can even kick you out of your own network.

Limit Access to Your Access Point

Another stuff that can be helpful to protect your access point is to assign the right to use access point to limited computers. Each Network Interface card (NIC) or Wi-Fi cards has a kind of address called MAC or Media Access Control attached to it. And those MAC Addresses can be used to tell the access point to that which machines is allowed to use the network. The MAC address is like a key to each computer or machine to get access to the access point. MAC addresses can be determined via command prompt. Open the command prompt window. Type "IPCONFIG/ALL". This command displays the computers TCP/IP configuration. That means it displays all the information regarding to the network configuration of the machine. MAC address of the machine can be finding as Physical Address.

Hackers still can use some type of tools called protocol analyzer to find which MAC address allowed in network. So limiting the access to the access point with the help of MAC address is not yet a perfect security method. If they are able to spoof the valid address then they can bypass your address filter. Non of wireless mechanism are perfect since the hackers always derive new idea to defeat security but if you care about at least these things then your network cant be easily hacked or harmed.