That doesn't mean he can't hack into your computer, if your computer is connected to the same router. It's a lot easier if you are on the same LAN.

 

"reads comments" pulls out notebook, *jots down notes*

 

these 3 steps should be no brainers. if you don't know these, then you shouldn't be running a wireless network.

 

he cant hack into the wired portion.

 

Can someone explain how to do this on layman's terms and without acronyms? We have a Belkin wireless router for my wife's laptop and have twice come home to find a car parked across the street from us with a laptop open in the passenger's seat. both times I came in the house and turned off the router and the car left in less than 30 seconds.

David

 

If you are too dumb to know about the security and enable it, then you deserve to get "piggybacked".

I choose to leave my WiFi enabled, and have helped most my neighbors to get on it. I have them throttled down so they don't really affect my bandwidth much, none of them are technical enough to figure out how to hack the systems anyway, and all of my systems are secured just in case. I could care les who gets on the WiFi point.

But anyone who sets one up, then doesn't read about enabling security deserves what they get. That's what the manual is for.

 

If your wired network is on the same LAN as the wireless (basically, behind the same Internet router and on the same IP block), he may as well be plugged directly into your PC. Perhaps this isn't the case, but that would be out of ordinary for most home networks. How is your wired network separated from your wireless?

 

how do you know if someone is on your router?

 

There are no less than 10 available networks where I am sitting now. I'm only running 1 of them.

MAC filtering helps for me, but if someone really wanted on, it would be relatively easy.

 

If you guys can try to use WPA rather then WEP. WEP is based on an alogarithim (sp) of repeating codes. You can download a simple program that will hack the WEP code. Although it takes about 6 days it can be done which is why WEP is a risk. WPA uses a random producing alogarithim making it MUCH harder to hack...something no simple dos program could do.