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Welcome back to the final steps. These steps have nothing to do with wireless security. What they have to do with is protecting private date in your network should your wireless network be compromised. If you have followed parts two and three your wireless network is as secure as it can be. What if someone does get in? What I want to discuss now is what you can do to protect yourself should that happen. This is just an overview and not a step-by-step. This is food for thought. If you would like help doing this please come to my site and ask in the forum. I would be more than happy to go into detail on this.
Once an intruder is in your network they have access to all the resources in your network. I highly doubt you have a domain, but a workgroup network. This means the security has to be done on each individual workstation for them to be able to transfer data to each other. I don't know for a fact, buy I suspect this is why Microsoft made the security so wide open in Windows. If you had to set everything manually out of the box it would be extremely hard to get the computer to communicate with each other.
By setting default workgroup names, no passwords on administrative accounts and wide open shares people can network their computers together with ease. There is a big problem with this. Once someone is in your network they can get to your stuff with the default settings, There are two default settings to be concerned with the most. The default workgroup name, which has been the same for years, has been either "workgroup" or "MSHOME".
The default administrative password has been blank. With these two settings not changed, the intruder has absolute power over your network. They can steal data, lock you out of your network so you cannot get to your data, install whatever they want and do any damage imaginable. Here is a scenario of an intruder getting into the network and just how easy it is. I have done this with clients to show them and they take a whole new look on security after it has been showed to them.
The intruder cracks the security of your wireless network. He now has an IP address in your network. DNS does not matter at this point for the damage can be done with the IP address alone. He runs a ping sweep on your network. This is simply a script that pings every address in your IP address range and any computer that is on the network will respond. Once he gets a response from the computer(s) he knows which computer to attack. He sets the workgroup name on his computer to workgroup and reboots. He will then go to the IP address he found and try to access the default administrative share.
Here is what that would look like \\192.168.89.2\C$. He could not make a connection so he sets the workgroup name to MSHOME and tries again. He takes for granted the default password has not been changed so he leaves his password blank. This matches the administrator account on both computers. This time he has access to your C:\ drive. The $ symbol is just a share that is hidden and the default administrative share is on the root of C and shared as C$. He is in and has control. How can you prevent this?
Set a strong password on the administrator account and don't use it unless you need to make administrative changes. See PART1 for a tool to check the strength of passwords. Create an everyday user account with user privileges and set a password on that. You will have to create the same account with the same password on all the computers you want to share data with. The administrator account does not have to match, but they will not be able to administer the other computers. Next, change the workgroup name. Change it to anything, but not something easy like you last name.
This is the final steps you can take to secure your data. You can go as far as data encryption, but there is a lot of overhead in it and not as easy as it sounds. You do stand a chance of loosing date if something goes wrong.
Thank you for taking the time to read these articles and if you have any questions or comments please go to TechAlternatives and let me know.
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