How to secure home network

If you have been wondering how to secure home network. Here are few tips for you.

At home there may be quite many devices connected to the internet. Wireless devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and moderns televisions. Then there might be some more traditional wired devices. Common thing for all these is your home router which shares wlan and connection.

Pay attention to these things

• WLAN password is complex enough
• Router admin password is not left to the default value
• Look for other default users from the router and change those password accordingly

There is not just one general rule or instructions how to change these. But look for router's vendor, then search that vendor’s website for help. Usually you need to find “default gateway IP” of your home network and access that IP with the internet browser. E.g. this page gives good step-by-step instructions how to find default GW on Windows or Mac PC

Bad guys at internet are looking devices with default value. If found it is like “open door” for them to access your internet. Think about keeping your home’s back door unlocked, same thing.

One might think that “I have firewall in place. Doesn’t it help in this case?” In some case yes. But there are also predefined support connections configured to the firewalls, which opens connection to the internet. Then firewall may be active on your computer but not at the router.

Other good thumb rule is to tighten different layers and that way make it more difficult to have unwanted visitors to your home network. This means above tips but then install additional security controls, such as anti-virus programs.

Personal privacy

Speaking of additional programs. One very usefu tool  is F-Secure’s Freedome VPN (Virtual Private Network) client. It works on Android, iOS, Windows and OS X machines. I have used it roughly one year now on my iPad. Advantage with Freedome is that it creates secure connection from your device to F-Secure’s server. This is very useful feature especially when travelling and you are using unknown guest wlans. You are not able to know when someone is e.g. capturing (stealing) traffic from your device. You might be sending personal data and want to make sure it won’t go to wrong hands. Freedome helps too in other areas. It blocks tracking cookies. These cookies collects data what kind of activities you do on internet.

With Freedome you can also change your virtual location to other country. It has been said that when searching flight tickets, price may be lower on other countries (to same flight). I tried this but at least in my case I couldn’t prove this. Same high price all the time :)

Anti virus

Other program I have used roughly one year is Trend Micro’s Internet Security 2015. Besides its ability to detect viruses it has some good features to warn if there are security risks in Social Media settings. If you use LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or some other Social Media application. You should be able to track whether these sites changes their security and privacy settings. Maybe they bring new features to the applications, which may expose some unwanted information to all users. Trend Micro tracks these kind settings and warns users. This has been very helpful for me. Trend Micro also has web site reputation feature in place. While googling, on result page is small green mark if the web site has good reputation.

Can you trust security vendors?

One interesting question is can you trust actually to these security vendors? I would say yes you can. Otherwise their business would be at the end very soon, if they start to spy customers. By the way. One common thing for these two vendors (F-Secure and Trend Micro) is their home country. Neither is US (or Russian) based. Other is from Finland and other is from Japan. Both of these countries have good reputation on information security business.