Is your company’s Wi-Fi a risk?

WiFi is a convenient and cost-effective solution for businesses, but it’s important to make sure your network isn’t at risk of being used and viewed by unscrupulous people.

Having an unsecured business WiFi network is like leaving confidential documents, business agenda or meeting notes on the train, anyone could pick them up. Any. You don’t want to be responsible for leaks due to a lack of attention to safety.

Hackers and starters can find instructions on how to access data, exploit an unsecured network, and steal intelligence. This means that someone who wants to defraud, impersonate or damage your business will have no problem figuring out how to hack into an unprotected network.

So now that we’ve seen the worst, what can be done to eliminate the risk?

• Always use a strong password and try to mix alphanumeric and case sensitive characters and make sure password availability to guest network users is restricted.
• Encryption scrambles data sent from a PC to a router so that others cannot read it. As baffling as it is for such a necessary service, many routers ship with the encryption feature turned off. You should verify that encryption is turned on and working at its optimal level, rather than assuming that your router is automatically protected at the point of installation.
• WPA is Wireless Protected Access and WPA2 has replaced the WEP wireless encryption protocol. WPA and WEP cannot be used together, so it is highly recommended to use either WPA or WPA2 because they are less susceptible to hacking and hijacking. If that means investing in a new WPA router, it’s worth the small expense to protect your network in the long run.
• Access points do not use encryption, so you will need to ensure that any access point used is legitimate. Also, your firewall is on and file sharing and radio are always off when you’re not in a hotspot. There are several hot spot protection providers that encrypt data. Not employing these security measures makes a hacker’s life ridiculously easy.
• Virtual private networks or VPNs protect public wireless links. The VPN was designed to create channels through which your encrypted data will travel and can be used by field personnel.
• It is best to run individual software firewalls on your network so each of your computers is protected. Some firewalls can be downloaded from the Internet for free, but check that the protection offered by the product is rigorous and sophisticated. Remember that firewalls only prevent hackers from accessing your computer.
• Check your provider bills, any obvious increase in charges or large additional usage could mean you are being hacked, at your expense.

As much as we would like to believe that all people are trustworthy, we all know that this is not the case. It is vital to protect our commercial WiFi networks and our businesses from the increasing number of people trying to steal our data.

Whatever the size of your business, network security management should be a priority.