Home Wi-Fi Router Security: 10 Settings Every Household Should Change
Every device in your home — laptops, phones, TVs, cameras, thermostats, game consoles — passes its traffic through one box. Compromise that box and an attacker sits between you and the entire internet, able to redirect your banking site, watch your traffic, and reach devices you assumed were private. Yet the typical home router runs on factory settings from the day it was plugged in. Here are the ten changes that matter most, roughly in order of impact. Do the admin password change last, not first. On the router I set up, every settings change logged me straight back out afterwards, so changing credentials at the start meant re-authenticating after each of the following nine steps. Before You Start: Get Into Your Router Open a browser and go to your router's admin address — usually 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1 . The default login is often printed on a sticker on the router itself. Many modern routers are managed through a phone app instead, which works just as well. 1. Ch...