Wi-Fi has become a massive part of the modern workplace, allowing employees to work remotely from their desks and boosting productivity within teams – but is your organisation ensuring that your network is secure?
If your business has an open Wi-Fi network, it can take less than 2 seconds for an attack on your systems to take place!
The sheer number of organisations that don’t have a secure network was brought to light by Sophos using a wireless scanner in London; it picked up 81,000 networks – up to 30% of which had no encryption or used the well-publicised weak Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption protocol.
What can you do to make sure your Wi-Fi is secure?
Choose the right Security option
All Wi-Fi networks offer different forms of security, the ones available to you may include;
-WEP
-WPA
-WPA2
When setting up your Wi-Fi Network, using a basic Wired Equivalent Privacy option (WEP) is highly unadvisable, the security is vulnerable and opens your network up to multiple forms of attack.
To achieve a more resilient Wi-Fi security, choosing a combination of both WPA and WPA2 will present a confusing setup for hackers to breach and offer greater protection to your network.
Choose a unique Password
Once your Wi-Fi has been setup, it will come with a default username and password. Leaving your network login information on the default settings is the easiest way for a hacker to gain access to your network.
Choose a unique password and either hide your Wi-Fi name or ensure it’s not your business name, as this will make it too easy for hackers to find your network.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
It is now common practice within organisations to allow your teams to use their own devices on the company network as a way of improving productivity. However, once a device has connected to your network, it becomes vulnerable to any infection that may be on that device.
If you’re going to implement BYOD within your business, make sure that you have security measures in place to protect your network.
Setup a Guest Wi-Fi
A common mistake that organisations make it allowing guests onto their vital business network through the Wi-Fi, making it too easily accessible. By setting up a ‘Guest Wi-Fi’ with minimal access to company data you can ensure the protection of your business network, whilst still being able to offer Wi-Fi access to your valued clients.
Education
Knowing the threats to your security is imperative for avoiding them, human error is the largest cause of cyber-attack – make sure you educate your teams on the importance of IT security.
If you wish to discuss your network security, don’t hesitate to contact us to speak with one of our technical experts.