Can My Home WiFi be Hacked?

Posted by freemexy on October 30th, 2019

an My Home WiFi be Hacked?

As long as your data is valuable, there is a chance that your home WiFi gets hacked. The most effective way to avoid this is to use a VPN encrypted connection, as is the case in most companies.

Hacking WiFi is an easy job for the hacker. Many techniques can be exploited by them to perform an attack on your home WiFi. Generally, there are five commonly used hacking methods, including password cracking, social engineering attacks, WPS PIN attacks, remote access attacks and rogue access points.

WPS PIN attack

WPS PIN attacks have been widely used since they were discovered. The attack completely bypasses the password set for the router because the password authentication is not properly set. So the hacker can easily get into your WiFi network.

Rogue access point

A rogue access point is built on a WiFi network without explicit authorization from a local network administrator.

Password cracking

Password cracking is a proven way to break into a WiFi network. WiFi with an easy-to-crack password is likely to suffer such an attack.

Social engineering attack

Unlike other attacks, social engineering attacks are hard to detect. Typically, it works by spoofing users rather than exploiting technical vulnerabilities. Thus, the victim may don’t know that he was attacked.

Remote access attack

While remote access can be convenient for employees to access resources provided by the company, turning it on by default is a bad idea. Because you will run the risk of a remote access attack.

How to prevent your WiFi from being hacked?

VPN services are generally useful because they allow you to create encrypted tunnels that prevent others from seeing what you’re doing. It also secures your personal information while you are connecting to public WiFi. If you need to use WiFi and the only option is a network you don’t trust, consider installing a VPN on your phone.

In addition to protecting devices connected to WiFi, you can also make it harder for hackers to break into your home network by improving the security of it. Here are some other measures you can take to protect your home WiFi.

MAC filtering

MAC filtering means that you enable the MAC address blacklist or whitelist in the router’s settings. Of course, whitelisting is more recommended here. Users only need to add the MAC Address of the device they want to connect to the network to the whitelist so that only those added devices can connect to the wireless network.

Now that you’ve set up the filter, you might be wondering whether it is impossible for other devices to connect to the network. The answer is no, either. Because once the hacker has successfully cracked your wireless network password and there are active users in the network, the hacker can also try to grab the MAC address in the whitelist by grabbing packets from the network transmission. Next, the hacker just needs to change the MAC address of his device to that from the whitelist. Then, the hacker’s device can successfully connect to your wireless network.

Use WPA encryption

Since WPA adopts dynamic encryption transmission, the only way to crack it is to use enumeration. But as long as the password is strong enough, cracking it by force takes a long time. It takes at least three seconds to crack a password. If it is a strong 8-bit password that contains both upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols, it should theoretically take about 500 million years to crack this password. If individual users change their passwords every few months, cracking the WiFi passwords is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Users who keep a good habit of changing their passwords regularly won’t be the easy targets of hackers.

Hide SSID

Hiding SSID means to adjust relevant settings of the router so that the SSID of your wireless network will no longer be broadcast. Your home private network will become an “invisible network”, which can greatly reduce the risk of being attacked by hackers.

Currently, mainstream operating systems for PC, including Windows XP/Vista/7/8, as well as macOS, various versions of Linux, and major smartphone OS, such as iOS, Android, and Windows all help you hide the SSID of wireless networks. You only need to manually add the SSID of the network when connecting to it for the first time. Then, the system can automatically remember the relevant information of the wireless network connection and make an automatic connection next time.

Now that your network is invisible, you might be wondering whether you are completely safe. The answer is absolutely no. As long as there is communication between the router and the member on your wireless network, SSID can still be detected. But hiding SSID will make it harder for the hacker to crack your network. Given the cost, hackers often target other networks. Qwer432

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freemexy
Joined: December 6th, 2018
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