WiFi Security Checklist 2

Posted by JD 06/05/2010 at 09:01

In the last few days, a permanent article here about a WiFi Router Security Checklist has gotten a very large number of hits, over 100x the normal page views. It contains 15 or so suggestions that every home or small business wifi router user should do from a security point of view.

Nothing New

I didn’t think anything inside the article was new or ground breaking, but the large number of hits prove me wrong. No, bandwidth needs aren’t like LH or /. The other most popular article is on Setting up dual monitors for Ubuntu 10.04 with nVidia drivers. That article is found by googling. None, zero, nada, of the other search engines refer anyone. Does anyone use yahoo or bing still?

What have I learned from this experience?

  1. People seem to like lists of 5 to 20 things about a topic. Watch out loyal readers, more will follow!
  2. Checklists are good. I knew that already after working in places that had checklists of checklists.
  3. Explain why something is or is not a good idea as succinctly as possible. I updated the UPnP comment in the article based on a LH commenter request. Thanks.
  4. The content should explain how-to accomplish the suggestions or they need to be fairly obvious.
  5. Confirmed my use of bold fonts for key points and section headings to help skimmers digest the most important content.
  6. More than 2 pages of content is too long, unless there is a diagram.
  7. Know your audience. According to web analytics, 35% of you run a x-nix-based OS (Linux, OSX, Solaris, BSD, AIX, …). I like to think the other 65% running MS-Windows were stuck at work. ;) Less than 10% use IE as their browser. You guys are smart!

The next Top 15 article will be about Using Open WiFi in a Secure Way. Good idea?

I’m considering adding ads to the website to offset hosting costs. I promise I won’t do it like LinuxToday which has obnoxious, bandwidth hogging Microsoft ads with flash and popups. I just checked and saw 8 ads on their Home page. Time to re-enable AdBlock, that was simply too painful. It is terrible to see HUGE FLASH ads for Microsoft Sharepoint/Exchange whenever I visit using a Nokia/N800 browser.

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  1. budstd69 (at) REMOTE-hotmail.com 02/27/2011 at 12:30

    how do i secure my router if i do not have my manual?

  2. JD 02/28/2011 at 07:34

    a) Don’t leave your real email address on a public blog to be scrapped by spammers. I’ll fix that for you.
    b) Use google to find the manual for your model – but really, why would you need it? I’ve never looked at the manual for any home router other than the 1st one around 1997 (ISDN router). The web interfaces aren’t very hard to figure out.