March 14, 2025 • 29 mins
Questions we answer in this episode
Why do I need the manual for my router?
What's the first step in accessing my router?
How many passwords are there for my home network?
What are the two methods for connecting to a router?
Episode summaryIf you can install an app, and visit a website, you can learn to access your router.
Reading the section in the router's manual should help.
Yes, I realize many of us don't read manuals anymore, but that's what I suggest.
You also need to know your router's admin username and password is.
It's probably printed on the bottom of your router, but if not, here again, the manual is your friend.
Finally, install the router's brand app if they have one, and you're ready to go!
Call to actionConnect to your router, change the admin password, and keep that password in a safe place.
LinksMark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
All right, why do I need a manual for my router?
Look, reading any manual sounds boring to me, so I hope you have a good answer for this one.
What's the first step in accessing my router? Again, this is a fair question because
(00:21):
I would say manually pick it up, you know, like,
oh, how many passwords are there for my home network? Oh, man, dude, really? More passwords?
Well, you just, yeah, not, we're not going to add any. We're just going to make you aware of them.
(00:42):
Okay, okay, good. I was worried about that. You know how I feel about passwords.
Yeah.
What are the two methods for connecting a router?
With a cable, wirelessly? Is that the answer you're looking for?
Yeah, well, that's a good answer. That's a totally valid, correct answer.
(01:05):
That's just my bad on how I phrased the question because that is not the question I was intending
to ask, but a perfectly reasonable interpretation. So, we'll rephrase that question once we get to
that section and make sure it's clear what we're talking about there.
Sounds great. Sounds great. Okay, well, welcome back and thanks for tuning in. I'm Nick,
(01:30):
and this is Super Simple Security Principles. Listen each week and learn how to think,
not what to think. This is episode 54, and we're continuing on with safeguarding our home,
how to access your router. So, Makani, this sounds incredibly complex to me.
(01:54):
You're going to be able to keep it simple, right?
Well, you know, I'm glad you said that because, as you know, I always share, you know, kind of
my notes beforehand, have camera view for accuracy, for feedback, all those kind of things.
Yeah.
And that's basically what he said. He's like, dude, I don't know. This seems like a scary one
(02:14):
to tackle. I think lots of people might be too scared to do this. I'm like, well, fair enough.
I mean, you know, so we talked about it a little bit, and my perspective, at least, is this at
this point. We want to have more step-by-step guides for it to help people work through this,
(02:36):
right? We're going to start here, but it's far from going to be ending here.
Okay.
So, you know, if we come to the end of this episode, and you're listening,
and it's still too scary to tackle, that's fine. I'm not worried because it's still the right
place to start because we're going to teach some foundational principles and see if that's enough
(02:59):
to, you know, get you so you can do it on your own. And again, if not, that's fine, you know.
And if you're, if you don't feel ready, but you want, like, that you're wanting to now, though,
you know, you can always come to the forum for some more help and see if we can get you there.
And, you know, we have a small enough, you know, listener base still right now that, you know,
(03:23):
if you need some one-on-one help, that might even be an option.
Way to steal my thunder, man. I was going to say, if you have any questions after,
reach out to us on our forum. But, well said. Thank you.
Yeah.
We would. We'd love to hear from you. Again, for our listeners, please know I am not the expert
(03:46):
here. I learn alongside with you, so hopefully we can learn together. And that's what I'm kind
of looking forward to in today's show is, look, routers sound incredibly complex. And when we
start saying, where's the manual? I go, do I want to know this? Do I want to know this? Or is this
(04:07):
something I just want to stay oblivious to? So if I can, let's dive right in. And what's the
importance? Why do I need the manual for my router?
Yeah. Well, so stepping back just a little even before that is, and we've been talking about this
(04:29):
in the past few episodes of how critical the router is to the security of your home network,
right?
Right. Yeah, absolutely.
And it's...
We want to stop the incoming calls on it, right?
Exactly. Yep. It's the gatekeeper for all the devices in your home.
Yeah.
And so if it's going to do its job properly, we've got to make sure it's configured correctly,
(04:53):
which I'm sure sounds even more scary, right? But...
I thought of it as kind of like a sports analogy, right? I'm like, okay,
if we're going to have a game, we need to have certain players play certain positions and have
a game plan. And so for my router, especially where I'm using it to help block incoming calls,
(05:19):
I need to make sure that I have a game plan for my router that plays in place, that I have,
as you said, configuration correct in what I need to do to protect myself. Is that fair?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and just to maybe try to lower the scare factor a little bit is
(05:41):
when we'll go through this in more detail later, but if you think about your phone,
you know, and there's the settings or preferences or whatever it's called on your particular device,
you know, you go in there and change some things from time to time, right?
And essentially, that's all we're going to be doing with the router. It's not like we're
going to teach you to write code or there's, you know, a lot of weird mumbo jumbo. It's just
(06:03):
mostly a matter of getting access to your router and then, you know, flip, you know,
toggling a few switches, you know, putting in a couple of values. Like it's, yeah, I don't think
it's going to be too bad anyway. Maybe I'm optimistic, but we'll see. Says a security
expert. Yeah, admittedly so. But the thing is, like you said, right, we need a game plan.
(06:28):
And basically what that boils down to, I mean, the first step, I guess, is being able to access
the router. Okay. And so, I mean, not everybody in the house needs to be able to, but somebody,
at least in my opinion, I would rather have somebody in-house rather than having to hire
a computer expert that I don't necessarily know and trust. You know, if you've got one of those,
(06:54):
great. But anyway, so that's kind of my premise. And from my perspective, if you can install an
app on your phone or if you can visit a website, if you can do those two things, not or, I should
say and, if you can do those two things, then I think anyway you'll be able to do this. And I'm
going to do my best to at least start getting you there today. Okay. I mean, I feel like I can do
(07:23):
that on my phone, you know. Right. I know, I say, I know you can. I know enough about you. And most
people I think today probably can. So, now let's get to the manual. Yeah. And really that boils
down to, I mean, the classic advice of, you know, what do you do with something that, you know,
you don't understand or that you're complex? Read the instructions. Right. Right. And I mean, I know
(07:52):
these days with Google and, you know, such quick access to information and lots of things don't
even come with a physical manual, like reading the manual, reading instructions really has fallen out
of practice in a lot of ways. Absolutely. So, you know, I acknowledge fully that it's kind of a
(08:13):
thing to hear. Right. But that's, it's still, I feel like the way to start.
Okay. Fair enough. So, yeah. And I debated a lot about it, but anyway, so if you, and if you search
for instructions online about how to access your router, most of them you'll see are kind of
(08:37):
similar and in my opinion, fairly outdated. Okay, great. More complex than they need to be,
whatever, like technology changes quickly and routers are no exception. There's a lot of things
that haven't stayed, haven't changed, but there are a lot of things that have changed. And in
(08:58):
addition, there's many different brands and types of routers. And this is one I know you are familiar
with because a huge change in fairly recent years is the arrival of what's called mesh routers.
Yeah. Right. So, why don't you explain what's different about your mesh router in your,
(09:18):
from your perspective, Nick, than the kind of router you had before it, you know, whatever.
I'll jump in, but you're still on the spot big time. Oh yeah. Okay. For our listeners, I'm not
the expert, but a mesh system is where you have multiple devices that can broadcast that signal.
(09:39):
Is that correct? Yeah. That's, that's really, that's the single biggest thing to understand.
There's a bunch of other details, but that's the main thing that's relevant for everybody
is when you put it in, it's just, it's not just one box, you know, you're going to have them stuck
around at different places and that's part of what helps make them provide such good Wi-Fi coverage
(09:59):
for your house because there's multiple broadcast points. Right. Yeah. You have three. Yeah.
And so that's an example anyway of how routers have changed. Yeah. But of course, what hasn't
changed, even though it's not as trendy or whatever, as fashionable as they, they do actually have
instructions. They sometimes even have a paper manual these days, although usually it's just
(10:24):
like a tiny quick start guide, but there's always either online instructions or a document
you can download. So whatever it looks like, anyway, step one of accessing your router is
actually getting a hold of those instructions. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, in a previous
episode, we talked about them locating the manual for their router. Yeah. That was one of our call
(10:48):
to actions. Yeah. Okay. I was, I was doubting myself there for a second, but yeah, I'm not crazy.
Right. Nope. So, okay. So that's step one. Now, what I will say is a little caveat on those
instructions. We know that sometimes instructions are not as helpful as we'd like them to be.
(11:11):
Yeah. Right. That's very fair. Very honest. Yeah. So that's why we're going to talk about a couple
things that might help answer questions or problems that you'll run into. Okay. So that
basically boils down to step two is what you're always going to need to access your router is the,
(11:34):
the admin username and admin password. Okay. Okay. Now this goes back to our, one of our opening
questions. How many passwords are there? Right. So most times when I have explained this to
somebody in person, the first thing that comes to their head is the wifi password, right? Cause
(11:54):
that's the one that you use a lot. You remember, you probably have posted in your home, et cetera.
And that's an important password, right? But as you know, as everybody knows, the wifi password
lets you connect to the internet. That's what lets your individual devices connect to the internet.
So the router admin username and password, notice there is also a username here. Whereas
(12:19):
with the wifi, it's just a password with no username. Okay. So that's what you use to
connect to the router and change settings on the router. Okay. Control it, configure it. Does
that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. So we basically have to find our user
name and password for our router. Yep. Exactly. So, and a lot of times people don't have any idea
(12:46):
what that is because it got set up once and then it's been working and then they don't need it again
until they need to change something or something breaks or whatever. So it might be a very long
time. And so it often gets lost I've found. Yeah. That's what I'd probably worry about with mine.
I'd say, I know we didn't end up locating yours or I can't even remember. It's been years now
(13:08):
since we looked at that together. But anyway, here's what, you know, for our listeners,
if you don't know your router username and admin username and password, the first thing to do is,
if you don't know it is, if you didn't do the setup yourself, maybe check with whoever did and
hopefully they kept track of it. They can just tell you. Next is, especially if you have a,
(13:35):
I mean, I don't know how many, pretty recent, I mean, not that recent, I should say, actually,
they've started doing this. They'll have the username and password printed on the bottom of
them. Okay. And then if you have a really old router, all routers of a certain brand or model,
(13:56):
would ship with the same username and password. Most would have, yeah. Strikes you as a bad idea,
right? Oh yeah. That sounds like a terrible idea. Oh yeah. There have been a lot of problems over
the years because of that. I bet. Yep. And then you combine that with then enabling the remote
administration that we talked so much about, right? Yeah. You could get somebody to completely
(14:22):
take over. Yeah. And that's what, that's what happened because the username is usually admin
and the password was something simple like admin also or password or, you know, right. Terrible
idea. You can go, actually, there's a website, we'll put it in the show notes, routerpasswords.com
that shows all the different mass defaults that have been there over the years. So.
(14:49):
So can I, can I stop you there? Please. This sounds, this emphasizes the point of why it's
so important to, to understand your router and understand those things. Because if,
if you do happen to have a router, that's got a generic password and, you know, generic login,
(15:10):
like you really are more at risk. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah. Unless you've changed it.
Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Okay. All right. There you go. There's another plug for why this is so
important. Yeah. Well, and here's the good news. Like, I mean, I don't know how many years it's
been, but the, the default router, like if you go buy a router today, it is, it is pretty secure
(15:37):
out of the box. Okay. That's good. Like for the most part, they are really good. They they've,
I mean, they've had so many problems over the years. They've really upped their game. Like
normally you're not going to have to do anything. I mean, or, or very, a lot less anyway. It's,
it's, it's so much better. Okay. So yeah, the, I, I, I would be surprised with any,
(16:02):
any decent router if it had a default username and password anymore.
Okay. So I haven't checked all brands, but I'm, and maybe again, I'm optimistic. I don't know for
sure, but anyway. So I get, and then if you still can't figure it out again, you're welcome to come
(16:25):
visit the forum and we can talk through it and see if we can help you figure it out.
And then if you still can't figure it out, like we can't do it together,
there's really only one solution left and that's to do a reset on your router.
But you know, basically it's usually like holding down a button for a long time or whatever,
(16:47):
but it's super inconvenient and should be considered an extreme last resort. Only if
you actually need to change your router settings or you're ready to have some downtime because
it will not only reset your router, router administration, username and password,
which is what you want, right? But it's also going to reset the wifi network name and password
and all the other settings, the defaults. And depending on your internet provider,
(17:12):
it might even break your connection to the internet until it's reconfigured and like
require you to call your internet service provider to get reconnected. So please,
before you do that, I don't want anybody to yell at me because they followed my advice and reset
their router and now their internet's broken. Like come talk to me on the forum first, please.
(17:33):
So, right. I was going to say, isn't that what happened with mine?
Is when we reset my router, it killed the internet for a while.
I think you might be right. I can't remember if it was that or just because we bought,
like we bought you a new standalone cable modem, which is the piece of hardware that connects,
(17:55):
that your ISP actually connects with. And that's something we're going to talk about more
because routers these days usually combine a bunch of pieces of hardware. They're like a cable modem,
like you had, we bought separately that's specific to cable internet. And then there's the part that
provides wifi and that can be separate. And a lot of times it's just all bundled into one. So
(18:19):
anyway, we'll talk more about that later, but I can't remember for sure with you, but maybe.
Fair enough. So, then once you know your username and password, of course, if it's
a default one or if it's not a good one, please update it to a strong, unique password, right?
That's like, we won't talk about other securing things today, but I figure while we're
(18:45):
doing that, let's do that. And I suggest 14 characters long.
Okay. And ideally you'd use a password manager to generate a new one for you and you could have
even longer than that and you store it there. But if you're not there, you could even write it down
and tape it to the bottom of the router as long as you're not worried about people in your own
(19:09):
home finding it. Okay. So, okay. So, we got some instructions. We've got an admin username and
password. So, the last step, and this goes to the start opening question that I asked in a
confusing fashion, was how you connect to the router specifically to administer it, not to
(19:35):
connect to it for purposes of getting access to the internet. That was the clarifying point that
wasn't in there. Gotcha. Okay. And so, you can use most modern routers have an app that you can
install to configure them. And if they do, that's where I would probably try first,
(19:56):
because that's usually pretty simple. It's going to be specific. So, if you have a TP-Link
router, it's going to be a TP-Link app. If you have an ASUS router, if you have a Linksys,
those are some of the big name ones. Anyway, it's going to be very specific to your brand.
Brand. Okay. Perfect. So, that's what I would go to first. And there are some,
(20:20):
and I don't personally actually use an app, but I'm a little more geeky, obviously.
But the other way is still common, and usually they support both, is just like visiting a website.
Okay. I mean, it's visiting your router as though it were a website. So, in a browser,
(20:41):
you would type in a particular address, and it would actually not connect you to a website on
the internet, but just be connecting you to the router. But the interface is like browsing a
website. Okay. Does that make sense? Makes sense. Yeah. And that's the part, this is the interface
(21:01):
where it gets, it can be, I mean, this is the place where it can be very confusing because,
and I'm trying to think of even how to explain it without,
because they're special, like a lot of times that address will be a number.
Right. Like, you know, 192.168.1.1, you know, up there, that kind of thing. And
(21:28):
because it's not a real website, it's just your router, sometimes you'll get warnings from the
browser that, you know, this is insecure, that there's like an invalid security certificate,
and I'm not going to go into all the reasons why, but the short version is that because there are
(21:49):
hacks that kind of look similar, I mean, that would yield those same warnings. Okay. I'll
explain that. Anyway, the main thing is you can ignore those warnings if you know you're
actually just trying to access your router. If you encounter them at some other time
when you're not trying to access your router, then you want to pay attention to those browser
(22:13):
warnings. Okay. Does that make sense? Okay. Yeah, it makes total sense. So, in this instance,
it's the one time where we're not going to pay attention to our browser warnings.
Yes, right. You do want to every other time, but yes, this is what I give you permission to,
you can just ignore it because I get it every time. Actually, I've managed to work around now,
(22:36):
but for a long, long time, I was getting a warning for my browser every time I would access my
router, which I do a lot. Gotcha. I was going to say, this is just one of those
you can bend the rules here. Yeah, because it's just confused about, but anyway, hopefully you
(22:57):
can just avoid all that and use the app because that's going to be a lot simpler for most people
most of the time. Okay. Awesome. But anyway, and if you have any problems with that, again,
like we've been beating that drum this whole time, come visit us on the forum. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. So, did we answer all our questions, Nick? I think we did, but you got to double
(23:23):
check me here. Reading through them. I think so. Okay. All right. Yeah. So, we already to that time
of our show, like we already reached our call to action. Yep. That was quite fast. Yeah. Well,
(23:49):
you know, we're about our kind of our normal time, but I wasn't sure because we had kind
of a long warmup. So, if we were going to run long on this one, but we're kind of in our normal
range. So, yeah. Nope. Well, and that wasn't too terribly painful either. Like I was able to get
through that. Okay. I was going to say that's good because, right, we were kind of talking at the
start, maybe this is really scary. And so, yeah, I'm glad you kind of remind us of that, of that's
(24:14):
where you're ending right now anyway, not feeling too scary about it, right? Right. Right. We're
just trying to access our router with a username and password so that we could configure it
correctly. And I'm assuming that in our next episode, we'll even talk about more things to
help configure with and steps and processes, et cetera. Yep. Yeah. And actually that that reminds
(24:36):
me of one other just small thing on the connecting. So, with a lot of the modern routers,
and I believe this is with your, like, especially with the mesh ones. Yeah. The username and
password you have will not be just, it'll be one that's like you actually are connecting to the
internet. It's like a cloud-based management. And so, and I really kind of hate it in some ways
(25:01):
because it means that, like, you're dependent on this third-party service. You know, whoever,
like the routers brand provider, they have a website and you have to connect to it. And then
if they're down, it has all sorts of implications, but it's really common. So, just be aware that
username and password might exist just on your router, but it might exist in the cloud. It might
(25:25):
be on the internet and somebody else's, you know, the brand's website, if that makes sense.
That makes sense. Yeah. So, anyway. Okay. So, I'm ready to do the call to action now.
Let's get our call to action, man. Let's do it. So, this builds on, I mean, you know, pretty obvious,
(25:48):
I think, from our steps here, but it builds on our call to action from episodes 51 and 52.
Okay. Because, you know, there you located your router, right? Obviously, we're going to need to
know that and identified the brand and model. So, you can, then you went to the official brand
website for instructions. Yep. So, if you haven't done those two steps, you know, do that
(26:11):
first. You need the instructions. Right. And in them, they will have instructions on how to access
your router. Hopefully, that'll be pretty much telling you the name of the app to install.
You'll go to your app store, install the app, enter in your username and password,
and change the password to not the default, to a good strong password if you haven't.
(26:34):
And then, the last step is save yourself, save your future self, that is, a headache,
and make sure you don't lose that username and password because
you're going to need it again at some point. Yeah. Next episode, nothing else.
(26:55):
Right. Yeah, exactly. Don't want to have to reset. And we'll be, we're, well, actually, I'll let you
talk about the next episode, but you will need it in the next episode anyway. So, awesome. So,
that was kind of a long one, but, you know, to do the previous ones, get the instructions,
get logged in, and don't forget them. Don't forget your username and password.
(27:19):
That's an easy call to action. Get logged in to your router. Don't lose your username and password.
Yeah. I can do that. Okay. Awesome. Okay. So, in next week's episode, am I allowed to talk about
this already? Yeah, absolutely. Now that we know how to access our router, we're going to put that
(27:43):
knowledge to good use. I say we, but realistically, we all know that it's going to be our master
guardian walking us through seven, seven critical router security settings. So, remember these,
the reason this is so important is we are safeguarding our home here. Like, this is,
(28:07):
this is eliminating threats at our home front. Like, super important. So, let's safeguard our
home, our kids, figure it out together. You know, that was, that wasn't that painful.
You know, our call to action was get access to your router by username and password and
(28:27):
don't lose those. That's it. Like, two simple things. So, we're going to just build on what
we've already talked about and actually help you understand what critical router
security settings you need to have. Thanks, Nick. Well, yeah, I appreciate the reminder because,
(28:47):
you know, just the home thing, the way you phrased that, you know, tugs at my heartstrings a little
bit anyway. You know, you got people at your home you love and you, yeah, you just want to,
you want to safeguard that stuff, you know. Yep. So, absolutely. So, anyway. Okay. I'm ready.
All right, man. That was a good episode.
(29:09):
Are you ready to take action and wondering where to start? Get my Bulletproof My Identity Starter
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(29:30):
name and email and I will send you the first step. Again, that's bulletproofmyid.com.
All right, why do I need a manual for my router?
Look, reading any manual sounds boring to me, so I hope you have a good answer for this one.
What's the first step in accessing my router? Again, this is a fair question because
(00:21):
I would say manually pick it up, you know, like,
oh, how many passwords are there for my home network? Oh, man, dude, really? More passwords?
Well, you just, yeah, not, we're not going to add any. We're just going to make you aware of them.
(00:42):
Okay, okay, good. I was worried about that. You know how I feel about passwords.
Yeah.
What are the two methods for connecting a router?
With a cable, wirelessly? Is that the answer you're looking for?
Yeah, well, that's a good answer. That's a totally valid, correct answer.
(01:05):
That's just my bad on how I phrased the question because that is not the question I was intending
to ask, but a perfectly reasonable interpretation. So, we'll rephrase that question once we get to
that section and make sure it's clear what we're talking about there.
Sounds great. Sounds great. Okay, well, welcome back and thanks for tuning in. I'm Nick,
(01:30):
and this is Super Simple Security Principles. Listen each week and learn how to think,
not what to think. This is episode 54, and we're continuing on with safeguarding our home,
how to access your router. So, Makani, this sounds incredibly complex to me.
(01:54):
You're going to be able to keep it simple, right?
Well, you know, I'm glad you said that because, as you know, I always share, you know, kind of
my notes beforehand, have camera view for accuracy, for feedback, all those kind of things.
Yeah.
And that's basically what he said. He's like, dude, I don't know. This seems like a scary one
(02:14):
to tackle. I think lots of people might be too scared to do this. I'm like, well, fair enough.
I mean, you know, so we talked about it a little bit, and my perspective, at least, is this at
this point. We want to have more step-by-step guides for it to help people work through this,
(02:36):
right? We're going to start here, but it's far from going to be ending here.
Okay.
So, you know, if we come to the end of this episode, and you're listening,
and it's still too scary to tackle, that's fine. I'm not worried because it's still the right
place to start because we're going to teach some foundational principles and see if that's enough
(02:59):
to, you know, get you so you can do it on your own. And again, if not, that's fine, you know.
And if you're, if you don't feel ready, but you want, like, that you're wanting to now, though,
you know, you can always come to the forum for some more help and see if we can get you there.
And, you know, we have a small enough, you know, listener base still right now that, you know,
(03:23):
if you need some one-on-one help, that might even be an option.
Way to steal my thunder, man. I was going to say, if you have any questions after,
reach out to us on our forum. But, well said. Thank you.
Yeah.
We would. We'd love to hear from you. Again, for our listeners, please know I am not the expert
(03:46):
here. I learn alongside with you, so hopefully we can learn together. And that's what I'm kind
of looking forward to in today's show is, look, routers sound incredibly complex. And when we
start saying, where's the manual? I go, do I want to know this? Do I want to know this? Or is this
(04:07):
something I just want to stay oblivious to? So if I can, let's dive right in. And what's the
importance? Why do I need the manual for my router?
Yeah. Well, so stepping back just a little even before that is, and we've been talking about this
(04:29):
in the past few episodes of how critical the router is to the security of your home network,
right?
Right. Yeah, absolutely.
And it's...
We want to stop the incoming calls on it, right?
Exactly. Yep. It's the gatekeeper for all the devices in your home.
Yeah.
And so if it's going to do its job properly, we've got to make sure it's configured correctly,
(04:53):
which I'm sure sounds even more scary, right? But...
I thought of it as kind of like a sports analogy, right? I'm like, okay,
if we're going to have a game, we need to have certain players play certain positions and have
a game plan. And so for my router, especially where I'm using it to help block incoming calls,
(05:19):
I need to make sure that I have a game plan for my router that plays in place, that I have,
as you said, configuration correct in what I need to do to protect myself. Is that fair?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and just to maybe try to lower the scare factor a little bit is
(05:41):
when we'll go through this in more detail later, but if you think about your phone,
you know, and there's the settings or preferences or whatever it's called on your particular device,
you know, you go in there and change some things from time to time, right?
And essentially, that's all we're going to be doing with the router. It's not like we're
going to teach you to write code or there's, you know, a lot of weird mumbo jumbo. It's just
(06:03):
mostly a matter of getting access to your router and then, you know, flip, you know,
toggling a few switches, you know, putting in a couple of values. Like it's, yeah, I don't think
it's going to be too bad anyway. Maybe I'm optimistic, but we'll see. Says a security
expert. Yeah, admittedly so. But the thing is, like you said, right, we need a game plan.
(06:28):
And basically what that boils down to, I mean, the first step, I guess, is being able to access
the router. Okay. And so, I mean, not everybody in the house needs to be able to, but somebody,
at least in my opinion, I would rather have somebody in-house rather than having to hire
a computer expert that I don't necessarily know and trust. You know, if you've got one of those,
(06:54):
great. But anyway, so that's kind of my premise. And from my perspective, if you can install an
app on your phone or if you can visit a website, if you can do those two things, not or, I should
say and, if you can do those two things, then I think anyway you'll be able to do this. And I'm
going to do my best to at least start getting you there today. Okay. I mean, I feel like I can do
(07:23):
that on my phone, you know. Right. I know, I say, I know you can. I know enough about you. And most
people I think today probably can. So, now let's get to the manual. Yeah. And really that boils
down to, I mean, the classic advice of, you know, what do you do with something that, you know,
you don't understand or that you're complex? Read the instructions. Right. Right. And I mean, I know
(07:52):
these days with Google and, you know, such quick access to information and lots of things don't
even come with a physical manual, like reading the manual, reading instructions really has fallen out
of practice in a lot of ways. Absolutely. So, you know, I acknowledge fully that it's kind of a
(08:13):
thing to hear. Right. But that's, it's still, I feel like the way to start.
Okay. Fair enough. So, yeah. And I debated a lot about it, but anyway, so if you, and if you search
for instructions online about how to access your router, most of them you'll see are kind of
(08:37):
similar and in my opinion, fairly outdated. Okay, great. More complex than they need to be,
whatever, like technology changes quickly and routers are no exception. There's a lot of things
that haven't stayed, haven't changed, but there are a lot of things that have changed. And in
(08:58):
addition, there's many different brands and types of routers. And this is one I know you are familiar
with because a huge change in fairly recent years is the arrival of what's called mesh routers.
Yeah. Right. So, why don't you explain what's different about your mesh router in your,
(09:18):
from your perspective, Nick, than the kind of router you had before it, you know, whatever.
I'll jump in, but you're still on the spot big time. Oh yeah. Okay. For our listeners, I'm not
the expert, but a mesh system is where you have multiple devices that can broadcast that signal.
(09:39):
Is that correct? Yeah. That's, that's really, that's the single biggest thing to understand.
There's a bunch of other details, but that's the main thing that's relevant for everybody
is when you put it in, it's just, it's not just one box, you know, you're going to have them stuck
around at different places and that's part of what helps make them provide such good Wi-Fi coverage
(09:59):
for your house because there's multiple broadcast points. Right. Yeah. You have three. Yeah.
And so that's an example anyway of how routers have changed. Yeah. But of course, what hasn't
changed, even though it's not as trendy or whatever, as fashionable as they, they do actually have
instructions. They sometimes even have a paper manual these days, although usually it's just
(10:24):
like a tiny quick start guide, but there's always either online instructions or a document
you can download. So whatever it looks like, anyway, step one of accessing your router is
actually getting a hold of those instructions. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, in a previous
episode, we talked about them locating the manual for their router. Yeah. That was one of our call
(10:48):
to actions. Yeah. Okay. I was, I was doubting myself there for a second, but yeah, I'm not crazy.
Right. Nope. So, okay. So that's step one. Now, what I will say is a little caveat on those
instructions. We know that sometimes instructions are not as helpful as we'd like them to be.
(11:11):
Yeah. Right. That's very fair. Very honest. Yeah. So that's why we're going to talk about a couple
things that might help answer questions or problems that you'll run into. Okay. So that
basically boils down to step two is what you're always going to need to access your router is the,
(11:34):
the admin username and admin password. Okay. Okay. Now this goes back to our, one of our opening
questions. How many passwords are there? Right. So most times when I have explained this to
somebody in person, the first thing that comes to their head is the wifi password, right? Cause
(11:54):
that's the one that you use a lot. You remember, you probably have posted in your home, et cetera.
And that's an important password, right? But as you know, as everybody knows, the wifi password
lets you connect to the internet. That's what lets your individual devices connect to the internet.
So the router admin username and password, notice there is also a username here. Whereas
(12:19):
with the wifi, it's just a password with no username. Okay. So that's what you use to
connect to the router and change settings on the router. Okay. Control it, configure it. Does
that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. So we basically have to find our user
name and password for our router. Yep. Exactly. So, and a lot of times people don't have any idea
(12:46):
what that is because it got set up once and then it's been working and then they don't need it again
until they need to change something or something breaks or whatever. So it might be a very long
time. And so it often gets lost I've found. Yeah. That's what I'd probably worry about with mine.
I'd say, I know we didn't end up locating yours or I can't even remember. It's been years now
(13:08):
since we looked at that together. But anyway, here's what, you know, for our listeners,
if you don't know your router username and admin username and password, the first thing to do is,
if you don't know it is, if you didn't do the setup yourself, maybe check with whoever did and
hopefully they kept track of it. They can just tell you. Next is, especially if you have a,
(13:35):
I mean, I don't know how many, pretty recent, I mean, not that recent, I should say, actually,
they've started doing this. They'll have the username and password printed on the bottom of
them. Okay. And then if you have a really old router, all routers of a certain brand or model,
(13:56):
would ship with the same username and password. Most would have, yeah. Strikes you as a bad idea,
right? Oh yeah. That sounds like a terrible idea. Oh yeah. There have been a lot of problems over
the years because of that. I bet. Yep. And then you combine that with then enabling the remote
administration that we talked so much about, right? Yeah. You could get somebody to completely
(14:22):
take over. Yeah. And that's what, that's what happened because the username is usually admin
and the password was something simple like admin also or password or, you know, right. Terrible
idea. You can go, actually, there's a website, we'll put it in the show notes, routerpasswords.com
that shows all the different mass defaults that have been there over the years. So.
(14:49):
So can I, can I stop you there? Please. This sounds, this emphasizes the point of why it's
so important to, to understand your router and understand those things. Because if,
if you do happen to have a router, that's got a generic password and, you know, generic login,
(15:10):
like you really are more at risk. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah. Unless you've changed it.
Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Okay. All right. There you go. There's another plug for why this is so
important. Yeah. Well, and here's the good news. Like, I mean, I don't know how many years it's
been, but the, the default router, like if you go buy a router today, it is, it is pretty secure
(15:37):
out of the box. Okay. That's good. Like for the most part, they are really good. They they've,
I mean, they've had so many problems over the years. They've really upped their game. Like
normally you're not going to have to do anything. I mean, or, or very, a lot less anyway. It's,
it's, it's so much better. Okay. So yeah, the, I, I, I would be surprised with any,
(16:02):
any decent router if it had a default username and password anymore.
Okay. So I haven't checked all brands, but I'm, and maybe again, I'm optimistic. I don't know for
sure, but anyway. So I get, and then if you still can't figure it out again, you're welcome to come
(16:25):
visit the forum and we can talk through it and see if we can help you figure it out.
And then if you still can't figure it out, like we can't do it together,
there's really only one solution left and that's to do a reset on your router.
But you know, basically it's usually like holding down a button for a long time or whatever,
(16:47):
but it's super inconvenient and should be considered an extreme last resort. Only if
you actually need to change your router settings or you're ready to have some downtime because
it will not only reset your router, router administration, username and password,
which is what you want, right? But it's also going to reset the wifi network name and password
and all the other settings, the defaults. And depending on your internet provider,
(17:12):
it might even break your connection to the internet until it's reconfigured and like
require you to call your internet service provider to get reconnected. So please,
before you do that, I don't want anybody to yell at me because they followed my advice and reset
their router and now their internet's broken. Like come talk to me on the forum first, please.
(17:33):
So, right. I was going to say, isn't that what happened with mine?
Is when we reset my router, it killed the internet for a while.
I think you might be right. I can't remember if it was that or just because we bought,
like we bought you a new standalone cable modem, which is the piece of hardware that connects,
(17:55):
that your ISP actually connects with. And that's something we're going to talk about more
because routers these days usually combine a bunch of pieces of hardware. They're like a cable modem,
like you had, we bought separately that's specific to cable internet. And then there's the part that
provides wifi and that can be separate. And a lot of times it's just all bundled into one. So
(18:19):
anyway, we'll talk more about that later, but I can't remember for sure with you, but maybe.
Fair enough. So, then once you know your username and password, of course, if it's
a default one or if it's not a good one, please update it to a strong, unique password, right?
That's like, we won't talk about other securing things today, but I figure while we're
(18:45):
doing that, let's do that. And I suggest 14 characters long.
Okay. And ideally you'd use a password manager to generate a new one for you and you could have
even longer than that and you store it there. But if you're not there, you could even write it down
and tape it to the bottom of the router as long as you're not worried about people in your own
(19:09):
home finding it. Okay. So, okay. So, we got some instructions. We've got an admin username and
password. So, the last step, and this goes to the start opening question that I asked in a
confusing fashion, was how you connect to the router specifically to administer it, not to
(19:35):
connect to it for purposes of getting access to the internet. That was the clarifying point that
wasn't in there. Gotcha. Okay. And so, you can use most modern routers have an app that you can
install to configure them. And if they do, that's where I would probably try first,
(19:56):
because that's usually pretty simple. It's going to be specific. So, if you have a TP-Link
router, it's going to be a TP-Link app. If you have an ASUS router, if you have a Linksys,
those are some of the big name ones. Anyway, it's going to be very specific to your brand.
Brand. Okay. Perfect. So, that's what I would go to first. And there are some,
(20:20):
and I don't personally actually use an app, but I'm a little more geeky, obviously.
But the other way is still common, and usually they support both, is just like visiting a website.
Okay. I mean, it's visiting your router as though it were a website. So, in a browser,
(20:41):
you would type in a particular address, and it would actually not connect you to a website on
the internet, but just be connecting you to the router. But the interface is like browsing a
website. Okay. Does that make sense? Makes sense. Yeah. And that's the part, this is the interface
(21:01):
where it gets, it can be, I mean, this is the place where it can be very confusing because,
and I'm trying to think of even how to explain it without,
because they're special, like a lot of times that address will be a number.
Right. Like, you know, 192.168.1.1, you know, up there, that kind of thing. And
(21:28):
because it's not a real website, it's just your router, sometimes you'll get warnings from the
browser that, you know, this is insecure, that there's like an invalid security certificate,
and I'm not going to go into all the reasons why, but the short version is that because there are
(21:49):
hacks that kind of look similar, I mean, that would yield those same warnings. Okay. I'll
explain that. Anyway, the main thing is you can ignore those warnings if you know you're
actually just trying to access your router. If you encounter them at some other time
when you're not trying to access your router, then you want to pay attention to those browser
(22:13):
warnings. Okay. Does that make sense? Okay. Yeah, it makes total sense. So, in this instance,
it's the one time where we're not going to pay attention to our browser warnings.
Yes, right. You do want to every other time, but yes, this is what I give you permission to,
you can just ignore it because I get it every time. Actually, I've managed to work around now,
(22:36):
but for a long, long time, I was getting a warning for my browser every time I would access my
router, which I do a lot. Gotcha. I was going to say, this is just one of those
you can bend the rules here. Yeah, because it's just confused about, but anyway, hopefully you
(22:57):
can just avoid all that and use the app because that's going to be a lot simpler for most people
most of the time. Okay. Awesome. But anyway, and if you have any problems with that, again,
like we've been beating that drum this whole time, come visit us on the forum. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. So, did we answer all our questions, Nick? I think we did, but you got to double
(23:23):
check me here. Reading through them. I think so. Okay. All right. Yeah. So, we already to that time
of our show, like we already reached our call to action. Yep. That was quite fast. Yeah. Well,
(23:49):
you know, we're about our kind of our normal time, but I wasn't sure because we had kind
of a long warmup. So, if we were going to run long on this one, but we're kind of in our normal
range. So, yeah. Nope. Well, and that wasn't too terribly painful either. Like I was able to get
through that. Okay. I was going to say that's good because, right, we were kind of talking at the
start, maybe this is really scary. And so, yeah, I'm glad you kind of remind us of that, of that's
(24:14):
where you're ending right now anyway, not feeling too scary about it, right? Right. Right. We're
just trying to access our router with a username and password so that we could configure it
correctly. And I'm assuming that in our next episode, we'll even talk about more things to
help configure with and steps and processes, et cetera. Yep. Yeah. And actually that that reminds
(24:36):
me of one other just small thing on the connecting. So, with a lot of the modern routers,
and I believe this is with your, like, especially with the mesh ones. Yeah. The username and
password you have will not be just, it'll be one that's like you actually are connecting to the
internet. It's like a cloud-based management. And so, and I really kind of hate it in some ways
(25:01):
because it means that, like, you're dependent on this third-party service. You know, whoever,
like the routers brand provider, they have a website and you have to connect to it. And then
if they're down, it has all sorts of implications, but it's really common. So, just be aware that
username and password might exist just on your router, but it might exist in the cloud. It might
(25:25):
be on the internet and somebody else's, you know, the brand's website, if that makes sense.
That makes sense. Yeah. So, anyway. Okay. So, I'm ready to do the call to action now.
Let's get our call to action, man. Let's do it. So, this builds on, I mean, you know, pretty obvious,
(25:48):
I think, from our steps here, but it builds on our call to action from episodes 51 and 52.
Okay. Because, you know, there you located your router, right? Obviously, we're going to need to
know that and identified the brand and model. So, you can, then you went to the official brand
website for instructions. Yep. So, if you haven't done those two steps, you know, do that
(26:11):
first. You need the instructions. Right. And in them, they will have instructions on how to access
your router. Hopefully, that'll be pretty much telling you the name of the app to install.
You'll go to your app store, install the app, enter in your username and password,
and change the password to not the default, to a good strong password if you haven't.
(26:34):
And then, the last step is save yourself, save your future self, that is, a headache,
and make sure you don't lose that username and password because
you're going to need it again at some point. Yeah. Next episode, nothing else.
(26:55):
Right. Yeah, exactly. Don't want to have to reset. And we'll be, we're, well, actually, I'll let you
talk about the next episode, but you will need it in the next episode anyway. So, awesome. So,
that was kind of a long one, but, you know, to do the previous ones, get the instructions,
get logged in, and don't forget them. Don't forget your username and password.
(27:19):
That's an easy call to action. Get logged in to your router. Don't lose your username and password.
Yeah. I can do that. Okay. Awesome. Okay. So, in next week's episode, am I allowed to talk about
this already? Yeah, absolutely. Now that we know how to access our router, we're going to put that
(27:43):
knowledge to good use. I say we, but realistically, we all know that it's going to be our master
guardian walking us through seven, seven critical router security settings. So, remember these,
the reason this is so important is we are safeguarding our home here. Like, this is,
(28:07):
this is eliminating threats at our home front. Like, super important. So, let's safeguard our
home, our kids, figure it out together. You know, that was, that wasn't that painful.
You know, our call to action was get access to your router by username and password and
(28:27):
don't lose those. That's it. Like, two simple things. So, we're going to just build on what
we've already talked about and actually help you understand what critical router
security settings you need to have. Thanks, Nick. Well, yeah, I appreciate the reminder because,
(28:47):
you know, just the home thing, the way you phrased that, you know, tugs at my heartstrings a little
bit anyway. You know, you got people at your home you love and you, yeah, you just want to,
you want to safeguard that stuff, you know. Yep. So, absolutely. So, anyway. Okay. I'm ready.
All right, man. That was a good episode.
(29:09):
Are you ready to take action and wondering where to start? Get my Bulletproof My Identity Starter
Kit for free. The seven most vital layers of protection everyone needs. I'll send you one
step at a time and help you if you get stuck. Just go to bulletproofmyid.com and enter your
(29:30):
name and email and I will send you the first step. Again, that's bulletproofmyid.com.
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