On Jul 2, 2005, at 3:35 PM, Amber wrote:
I am wondering which settings I need to be attentive to so I can ensure I don't get outsiders surfing or exploring on my bandwidth.
The bad news it, its pretty trivial for anyone to do anything, no matter what security you set. It used to take 100k packets or so for them to be able to decrypt the WEP encoding but new software can usually do it in a few seconds now.
MAC address restrictions are fine but if someone has their card in promiscuous mode, they can see what MAC addresses are being allowed 'cos that part is sent in the clear, outside of any WEP encryption. And then they just clone the address of someone who is allowed.
Mac users are at a disadvantage for hacking into other peoples' base stations, the Airport card cannot be put into a promiscous mode (where it reads and records all traffic) unlike regular cards. so if your neighbors are al Mac users, turn on MAC address filtering and you are free from them, anyway :)
I use MAC address filtering, without WEP, and figure it's good enough. If someone wanted in, or to snoop, they are in, I just make it a little hard for regular folks and it's enough to keep most out.
IMO the most important thing for you to do for real security is make sure your base station has "remote administration" turned off; so people on the wired internet cannot try and telnet into it (and believe me, they will). Setting up MAC filtering or WEP is helpful but not really that protective.
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