Classic British Flight Sim

Hi all,

Currently looking into making my home wireless connection a little more secure. Just seen a program on TV which featured internet security and the technical chap stated that WEP is very much outdated and WPA encryption is now vital to ensure home security.

Now I'm very limited with knowledge on this subject but I would like to change over to WPA encryption. My ISP is BT who are very good and so far have been faultless with their service. My hub manager program gives me the option to have WPA encrption.

Is it straightforward or best left alone? Is there a tutorial available or can anyone assist or point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance.

To be honest for most home users no one would be that interested in hacking there web encryption. Unless you need WPA theres no hurry. Bare in mind that your online banking uses 128-bit encryption, so if its good enough for your money its probably fine for your internet conection.

If you have WPA, feel free to use it, it is better. Its much easier in Vista than in XP, but both are grand.

WEP is completely flawed and is easily overcome by anyone wanting to. WPA is the way to go and from my experience easier to set up than WEP as no silly hex number series is needed, just a nice complex password which you enter in your routers security setup page and in any machine you want to connect with.

Add MAC filtering to assign your machine or machines as the only ones allowed on your network and you get a good network, also make sure you change the router's default username and password.

While it's true that banking uses encryption, virtually everything else doesn't, even things like passwords for email accounts etc, that you type are broadcast in clear air. There's also the aspect of someone else leveraging your bandwidth for free and who knows what sites they're visiting.

Basically there's no reason not to go to WPA, there's lots of useful websites on the subject, it's certainly no harder than setting up WEP.

A nice little utility that you can use for free is Network Magic, it has a paid version to, but the free has everything you need to see what's going on on your network and they have useful forums that support even the free version.

Allan