Securing Your Wifi Router

Is it possible to get arrested for downloading illegal material even if you never download it yourself? Yes: When someone else logs onto your unprotected wifi, they can make a clean getaway while you get stuck with the blame. Tune in to learn more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com where
smart happens. Hi. I'm Marshall Brain with today's question. Can
you be arrested for downloading child porn even if you
never do? And the fact is that you can. There

(00:22):
have been several recent arrests that should send shivers down
the spine of anyone who has installed a wireless router,
also known as a WiFi router. These little boxes allow
your laptop, your iPad, and other wireless devices to connect
to the internet. Tens of millions of people in the
United States have installed wireless routers because they make it

(00:43):
so easy to connect to the Internet. It turns out
that if you install a wireless router, and if you
leave it in its default settings and you turn it on,
you've opened yourself up to a major vulnerability. Your new
wireless router creates a wide open WiFi hot spot with
a diameter of several hundred feet. Because you have used

(01:04):
the default settings, which means that you have set no
password to prevent people from connecting, anyone nearby can now
connect into your hot spot. It could be a neighbor,
the guest of a neighbor, or someone parked on a
nearby street. Because you have no password on your router,
anyone nearby can connect to your router in just a
few seconds. When they connect, you will not know that

(01:27):
it's happening unless you were to get in and look
at the routers log files and its tools and so on.
And you may not ever care. If they read a
few web pages or check their email with your connection,
that tiny bit of bandwidth they use would be imperceptible.
But if they start watching a streaming video off of
YouTube or Netflix, you may notice that your connection has

(01:49):
gotten really sluggish, and you may have no idea why.
The bigger problem, however, is child porn. If the person
connected to your hot spot downloads child pern bography, or
any other illegal material, federal agents are going to trace
the illegal activity to your wireless router, and then they're
gonna come after you. Once they find you, the attitude

(02:11):
will be to arrest now and ask questions later. Meanwhile,
the person who did the downloading is invisible. It may
take days or weeks for your innocence to be confirmed.
And the amazing thing is that you will have no
idea that it's happening at the time it's happening. So
what can you do to prevent this scenario from unfolding.

(02:32):
There are actually three different things you can do, all
of which require a little bit of fiddling with your router.
If you are not technology minded, this fiddling may be
uncomfortable and you may want to enlist the help of
a friend who is technology minded or hire someone to
configure things. The basic idea is that your WiFi router
has a way to manipulate its settings. You need to

(02:54):
log into the router and at the very least set
up a WiFi password. How do you log into the router?
The owner's manual for the router will contain instructions on
how to do this. If you can't find the manual
that came with your router, you can find it on
the internet by typing the model number into a search engine.
Some routers even come with a CD that will help

(03:15):
you through these steps. So what you do is you
log into your router, find the wireless settings page, and
create something called a w P A password for your router,
not a web password. A w P A password is
the kind of password you would like to create. This
is one of those things that takes thirty seconds. If

(03:35):
you know what you're doing. As soon as you set
that password, you've eliminated the threat of accidental arrests for
child porn. Of course, you've also just disconnected all your
own devices as well. They can't connect in now that
you've set a password, So now you need to go
to your laptop, your iPad, and all your other devices
and type in the password there as well. They will

(03:56):
then be able to reconnect to your password protected wireless
rout uter, and chances are you will never have to
think about it again. If you want to be even
more secure, there are two other things you can do.
The first thing is to turn off something called S
s i D broadcasting. This is a feature that makes
your network visible to anyone who's nearby. Once you turn

(04:17):
off S s i D broadcasting, you can connect because
you know the S s i D that's one of
the things you set in your router settings, but other
people will not see your network. The other thing you
can do is turn on Mac address screening. You can
enter the MAC address of each device you want to
connect into your network. Anyone with an unknown Mac address

(04:38):
will be denied access, even if they guess the password
while you're in there. Making these changes. Make sure your
router does not create and enable a separate guest network.
Some routers do this as a courtesy or as an
extra feature. If your router does create a second guest network,
disable it or set a password on this second high

(05:00):
spot as well. By enabling all three of these features
and making sure you don't have a guest network, you
make it virtually impossible for anyone outside of your household
to connect to your network. And now you've made it
impossible for strangers to download child porn through your network
and for someone from the federal government to break down
your door early in the morning. For more illness and

(05:24):
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