Wireless

[pete10smith]

Hello. We currently do not have wireless in our house and want to know the benefits of having it and how secure is it as we do simple banking online and have heard it has many flaws in it

Pete

[codemonkey]

The main benefit is that you don't have wires trailing all over your house. If you have 3 or 4 computers or alptops in various bedrooms etc then trying to connect them all to one router down by your phone line means cables running up your stairs etc etc.

With the latest wireless N technology or even the previous iterations like 54G the range you can get wirelessly these days is brilliant.

With regard to security, wireless is as secure as you make it. All modern routers have various encyptions standards built in. The standard being WPA-PSK these days. It used to be WEP but that was too easy to crack. WPA_PSK can still be hacked, but it would take a determined hacker a number of days to brute force the hashing of the keys.

So provided you setup the wireless netowkr correctly and use a long and strong enough encryption key then your pretty much safe.

There is no such thing as a completely secure system.

EDIT: (Unless the system in question is turned off, unplugged from everything, sealed in a lead lined container, covered in 6ft of concrete and sunk to the bottom of the ocean)

[coursemyhorse]

WPA can be cracked quicker than WEP in certain situations. It depends how secure you make it. This is not scaremongering, I'm just providing facts. You would be very very unlucky to live anywhere close to someone that would target your wireless network. If you use WPA and chose a suitably long and complex random hash key, you are very very unlikely to ever "get hacked" so to speak.
As said, security is all about building up layers. No one layer is a fail safe.
I use MAC address filtering, MAC address Ip assignment, Limited number of IPs dished out by dhcp on router, WPA2 with complex long key, Never Broadcast etc.

[pete10smith]

thank you. I'll have a look into it. It seems very complex.

Pete

[chipbricks]

usually online banking secure is done by encription between bank and you computer, as you traffic can be catched not only by wifi at home.