Those days are gone when there was just a single computer in the house and now mostly every individual of the family has his own computer. Because of this people create there home network to share the resources on all computers and also to share the internet connection. There is one internet line in the house and it gets shared by the router which has all the home computers connected to it. If all the computers are connected through physical LAN cables then there could be no security risk but if computers are connected wirelessly then definitely security is a concern. In wireless setup the Router sends and receives data to the computers wirelessly and any body can connect to the router if your wireless network is not secure. It is quite possible that your neighbor might be using your internet connection on his computer wirelessly if your wireless network is not secure. In this post we will discuss the ways to secure the home network for any unauthorized use and attacks.

As mentioned earlier if all the computers are connected using LAN cable and no wireless network is setup on your router then there is no way for someone to connect to your home network without your consent. The only security concern in this case would be to stop malicious software and viruses to enter your network and make sure that your network is pretty safe. Safeguarding home network from malicious software will be discussed later in this post. If your home network is set-up as wireless then make sure that you have enabled security on it. Enabling security on a wireless network means encrypting the signals transmitted from the router so that only people who have the password to you wireless network can get connected to it and others cannot. This encryption and password assignment can be done by entering into the routers console and making changes in the wireless security section. There you would find an option to encrypt your wireless and assign a WEP key to it. WEP stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy and if this is ON then your wireless network becomes as safe as a wired network. Once you turn on this privacy all required is to give the key t all the users who connect to your home network so that they get the access and once connected the key gets saved in Windows and will not prompt you again and again until you change the key.

Another key point to remember regarding the security of your home network is to protect it by enabling a good firewall on it. Generally all the routers available these days have inbuilt firewall and the settings for the same can be accessed again by going into the console of the router. You can set the level of protection there and can also add exceptions for some kind of traffic if you reckon that it is being blocked by the router’s firewall. This way it would be difficult for any body to enter into your network and access the resources or data and your network would be a secure one.