by Dan Moren
Tips for securing your network’s router
Passed along from former colleague Lex Friedman (who I believe got it from fellow former colleague Dan Frakes), this is a solid collection of pointers for securing your home router.
To tech-savvy folks, there’s a lot in here that’s obvious: keep your firmware upgraded, change your router’s default admin password, make sure you have a strong password protecting the network, and so on. But it’s still a good resource to pass on to less technical people of your acquaintance, and for those of us who serve as our family’s tech support–especially during the upcoming holiday season–it’s a solid blueprint for what to check on their hardware, too. (Personally, the idea of separate DNS services was something I hadn’t even thought about, but the point that this might have forestalled in part the recent Dyn outage is well taken.)
Network-based security concerns are only getting trickier, what with more and more devices in our homes that are online. Your router is quite literally the gateway to the Internet for all of those gadgets, so it’s best to take all the precautions possible–especially when they’re easy ones.