When thinking about your personal and business’s Cyber Security, more and more one must try to think like a criminal.

There are many vulnerabilities to consider. However, in my latest blog, I’ll explore Wi-Fi security.

Wi-Fi is an easy target for hackers, especially in a shared building or where the signal can be picked up in public areas.

Although it’s not overly common to see breaches through accessing Wi-Fi onsite, we are aware of cases where this does and has happened.

Of course, there’s nothing new here. We know hackers can and will setup an identical access point to your guest Wi-Fi and use this to steal credentials or personal data.

We see this more commonly in coffee shops, hotels, airports and, recently, I saw this happen at an IT event I attended where I was able to even see the person who initiated the attack! Needless to say, the authorities had a lot of interest in him.

Not having Wi-Fi to your internal network is smart and many clients now only have guest Wi-Fi. If an internal user wants wireless access, they use this connection to access the internet and then VPN back into the business using some form of multi-factor authentication giving an extra layer of security.

However, what about the question of displaying your company name in your Wi-Fi name.

ExampleplcCORPORATEwifi and ExampleplcGUESTwifi gives a huge amount of information about you away to anyone within range.

Using something like EPCwifi and EPGwifi may be better practice although, with a little work, someone could guess who the Wi-Fi belongs to, but it makes you less likely for the targeted attack.

Even better using random words is better - USERGROUP7G and Nonetworkaccess7C gives much less away. Security by obscurity.

Thinking further, and to home protection. If you have a default name on your home router let’s say ‘BTHUB4 ABCD 5’ then this is one to change. It may seem innocent enough, but it does tell hackers the make and model of the router which may be vulnerable to attack. Changing this to something different maybe painful for the few hours to reconnect all your devices but will make it harder for anyone to attack your home network.

If in doubt get your Wi-Fi network tested as part of your next Penetration Test from your trusted partner. This generally does not add on much more time if they are doing an internal test but will ensure you’re not vulnerable to attack this way.