How Secure is Your Home Internet?

By: Sam Robinson

A simple check and change will ensure your home internet is a whole lot more secure.

For some time now, we have been told about the importance of securing your wifi, and email accounts, with strong passwords.

Long gone are the days when “QWERTY”, or “password” were acceptable (not that they were back then either). For now, a combination of symbols, numbers, and capital letters are required. However, tech expert Geoff Quattromani from the Technology Uncorked podcast said we leave ourselves vulnerable to being hacked if we haven’t updated the password for our home internet router.

“When you set up your wifi modem or router that you’ve purchased, the login that you’re using to connect to that to set up your wifi, it’s usually the one that comes out of the box,” Geoff explained.

“It’s usually ‘admin’ for the username and maybe ‘password’ for the password. That’s the one that people are not changing.”

Geoff said that by not changing this password, we are opening ourselves up to hackers who could easily connect to our internet connection, and do whatever they like on our network.

“If you’ve got baby monitors, security cameras, or computers connected to your network. If all of these types of products don’t have strong passwords for logging in to those devices, you’re opening yourself up to [hacking].”

So how do we check the password, and make the change?

Geoff said it’s easily done by logging in to the router, with the information you got when you first set it up. In those settings you just change the default admin account.

“Change it to anything except for the default. Because anything is better than that.”

Article supplied with thanks to Hope Media.

Feature image: Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash