Is my Wireless network as safe as possible?

Hey guys, I recently set up and wireless network and am wondering if i have taken enough steps too make it secure. I have created a WEP encryption (64bit) and have taken off SSID broadcasting. Is there anything else I should do to keep it as secure as possible? I understand that a hacker, if he wanted to, could get on the network, I just dont want "the normal person next door" getting on my network when im not home. Thanks in advance!

Ps. Does a WEP encrytion ONLY make it so people cant get on the network, or does it also make it hard for people to intercept information sent from my computer to the router, it passwords and such. With a WEP encryption should i feel safe banking online, and also, should I use a 128 bit?

 

Hi,
Use 128 bit or higher if you can.
Yes the encryption key is used to encrypt the wireless communications
between router and PC.

Depending on your router you may also use MAC address filtering.
You put in your PC's MAC address and set your router to only give
an address and talk to that MAC address.
You could also set your IP address pool range so that there is only 1
IP address available to give out.
Set the address expiry to never and make sure your PC gets that address.

Nothing is 100% secure ( with enough packets sniffed from the air and
enough time and computing power the encryption could be broken).
If you are that much of a target you have much more to worry about.
With what you have already done that's as good as it gets.
Then let em hack away.

Bad out.

 

Ok, changed it to a 128 bit encrytion, so that is cool. I know my router supports Mac Address Filtering, just was never sure what it was, ill try to find out my mac address and use that too.

 

To get your PC MAC address do an ipconfig /all
in a command prompt.
It will be called physical address 6 pairs of Hexadecimal numbers.
Bad out.

 

Hmm, i have been trying that for the last 5 minutes. Each time it opens up the box and closes it within a second. I cant keep it open long enough to see any of the information... any suggestion?

 

Hah, answered my own question. Evidently using the run command prompt from the start menu was causing the problem. I typed in command first to open up the box, then typed in ipconfig /all and it worked fine.

 

Killed this post, you answered yourself.

 

Alright, well, managed to find out how to use Mac Address filtering, set it to only allow my mac address, have a 128 bit encrytion, and have Hide SSID... I think im as safe as I can get, well, atleast my network is. Thanks for turning me onto Mac Address filtering, and for all your help!

 

You are welcome,
I wish everyone took the time to secure their connections.
We are all better off for it.

Peace.