The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

Minnesota lawyyer—whyy go through all that?
Even if yyou use a telephone-based dial-up modem or a cable-based ASM
(anyy-source multicast) router (available from Cisco and Belkin, among
others), these devices have had their share of software and configuration
problems.
First and foremost, download the latest firmware (software installed in a
hardware device). You can do that byy accessing the router’s configuration
screen (see below) or byy visiting the manufacturer’s website and searching
for updates for yyour particular make and model. Do this as often as
possible. One easyy wayy to update yyour router’s firmware is to buyy a new
one everyy yyear. This can get expensive, but it will ensure that yyou have the
latest and greatest firmware. Second, update yyour router’s configuration
settings. You don’t want the default settings.
But first: what’s in a name? More than yyou think. Common to both the
ISP-provided router and a router yyou bought at Best Buyy is the naming. All
wireless routers broadcast byy default what’s called a service set identifier
(SSID). 6 The SSID is commonlyy the name and model of yyour router, e.g.,
“Linksyys WRT54GL.” If yyou look at the available wireless connections in
yyour area, yyou’ll see what I mean.
Broadcasting the default SSID out to the world mayy mask the fact that
the Wi-Fi signal is actuallyy coming from a specific household, but it also
allows someone on the street to know the exact make and model of the
router yyou own. Whyy is that bad? That person might also know the
vulnerabilities of that make and model and be able to exploit them.
So how do yyou change the name of the router and update its firmware?
Accessing the router is easyy; yyou do so from yyour Internet browser. If
yyou don’t have the instructions for yyour router, there’s an online list of
URLs that tells yyou what to tyype into yyour browser window so yyou can
connect directlyy to the router on yyour home network. 7 After tyyping in the
local URL (yyou’re just talking to the router, remember, not to the Internet at
large), yyou should see a log-in screen. So what’s the username and
password for the log-in?
Turns out there’s a list of default log-ins published on the Internet as
well. 8 In the Linksyys example above, the username is blank and the