Hardening a Wi-Fi Router
Apply practical settings to make a wireless network safer.
Locking Down Your Wi-Fi
Beyond choosing strong encryption, you can apply many practical settings to harden a wireless router and make it harder to attack. Hardening means reducing the ways an attacker could break in or misuse the network. This lesson walks through concrete, exam-relevant steps any administrator should take to secure a Wi-Fi router, from passwords to firmware.
Use Strong Encryption
Start with the foundation: enable WPA3, or WPA2 with AES if WPA3 is unavailable, and never WEP or WPA-TKIP. Then set a strong, unique passphrase, long and random, not a dictionary word or the default. A weak PSK can be cracked offline even with WPA2, so the passphrase quality directly determines how safe the network really is.
All lessons in this course
- Why Open Wi-Fi Is Risky
- From WEP to WPA2 and WPA3
- Personal vs Enterprise Authentication
- Hardening a Wi-Fi Router