Wi-Fi: Prevent your neighbours from using it in the community

Other than the noise, nightmare neighbours, stealing a ladder from backyard there is another problem every resident face in a community. The Wi-Fi theft is the unseen issue every inhabitant should be aware of in a gated community. Even though having invested so many lakhs for a unit and moved in, there are yet these neighbours who are eager to irritate you. How to save your Wi-Fi from your neighbours? How do you do it? Let’s see how to prevent your neighbours from using your Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi: Prevent your neighbours from using it in the community

Ways to stop your neighbours from using your Wi-Fi: You need to take few precautionary measures in order to protect your Wi-Fi. There are people out there who are ready to pounce on your network if yours is not secured with a password. This could sometimes slow down your internet speed.

The first step is to set up a strong password: Cracking passwords are like splitting an egg to the hackers and programmers. They’re always ahead in these things. Always use a strong and lengthy password. This makes anyone difficult even to guess the password. Your password must contain capital letters, symbols, numbers and small letters. Sometimes, people set their ATMs password or other potential passwords to their Wi-Fi. Avoid these to protect your credentials from the hackers.For example, I would set my Wi-Fi password as 8S9.1Rco44. This looks lengthy and strong with capital & small letters, numbers and symbols.

The second step is to check the encryption settings on your network: To protect your network with a secure protocol, you should enable the WPA2 encryption. To do this setting, just connect your laptop to the router using an Ethernet cable and follow these steps.

Step1: Open your browser

Step2: Type the IP address of your router.

Step3: Enter the username and password. If you don’t have one on your own, use the default username and password.

Step4: Now click on the ‘wireless’ tab and select ‘security’.

Step5: Now an authentication type drop-down menu appears, select WPA2 from the list.

Step6: Select PSK and AES.

Step7: Set up the key with a strong password as discussed above and click apply.

After setting up, plug out the Ethernet cable and look for the SSID and enter a new password to go surf wireless.

Third is to choose the right SSID names

If your neighbour isn’t a technical geek, then definitely this trick will help you protect the Wi-Fi. Most users go with the default SSID name which is provided with the router. Instead, change the name of it to keep your hackers at bay. Hackers find it easy to hack your network when you have default SSID names. To prevent them from hacking your password, set up a new name for the SSID.

Try something like Virus13x0 or virus2y0xx

The fourth step is to hide your SSID

To go a step further, you can hide your SSID to boost your network security. To do this, you could turn off the SSID broadcast by the following steps.

Step1: Sign in with your router. This gives you to access the configuration page.

Step2: A set of radio buttons appears. Enable the wireless and security and disable the wireless router button. For some brands, these buttons would be unavailable.

Step3: Under the wireless settings, you could find these buttons for those who do not have the radio buttons.

Though hiding the SSID broadcast does not provide complete security. But this is enough to secure your Wi-Fi in your gated community. If your neighbour is a computer geek, then you could opt for some additional settings.

I used these techniques to protect my Wi-Fi network from the neighbours of gated community villas in OMR community I live in. Till now, I am 100% sure no one has hacked or connected to my wireless internet connection.