EggXpert

Wi-Fi makes your computer's resources available to users around you. On your home network you may not be too bothered about this, but outside the home this is an important consideration. Here's how to keep your system secure while on the road:

• Make sure each PC has up-to-date antivirus and firewall software.

• Always carefully consider whether important personal or work information should be stored on a laptop, as they are particularly vulnerable to theft.

• Secure any personal information, banking or credit card details. Software such as Password Safe (available free to download) will encrypt all passwords so you need remember only one password.

• If you’re using a wireless laptop to connect away from home, such as a Wi-Fi access point, you may find that you’ll see a lot more computers in your workgroup because everyone is running under the default name ‘MSHOME.' Remember anyone else would be able to see your shared documents, so changing your workgroup will keep out the curious and the opportunists, but it won’t keep out the determined, so you may wish to remove documents from your shared documents before going out!

The information in this tip originally appeared in the Wireless Basics online class discussion. By Kathie Kingsley-Hughes. 

http://help.cnet.com/security/9602-12576_39-0.html?messageID=2509691&tag=tip-2509691&kw=security

And to add to that, it's a great idea to have a second pc at home that has hamachi/vnc installed so you will always have a secured remote connection.

Hamachi : Stay Connected

RealVNC remote control software

Hamachi is a free VPN technology that allows you to have an encrypted tunnel from your wireless card, all the way to your home base (second machine). RealVNC is a free remote desktop viewer so you can use your second PC at home to browse the internet.

Here is a tutorial on how to install the two:

Help2Go - Remote Control Another PC Securely with VNC and Hamachi

Or, worst case, use https:// on all sites you visit... and hopefully the site will support it. This type of internet browsing also created an encrypted tunnel. For gmail users, try https://mail.google.com This allows you to use the https protocol past the login prompt.

For aim/yahoo/msn/gtalk use https://meebo.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also make sure you are not sharing the root of your hard drive and all its sub folders.... you would be surprised how many people use their computers on campus and give everyone on the network complete access... some even let you make changes to their files on top of it... while tempting to go through and cause mischief, I usually end up putting a txt file on their desktop explaining that they need to beef up their security.. or else people worse than me can cause a lot of damage.... I really wish i could have seen the looks on some of their faces....

You can use Hamachi and Freeproxy. Just have a PC at home be your proxy server. Now you have more secure web browsing.

Just a couple quick notes to add...

Regarding work files, there's a chance that the company you work for has specific policies about having corporate data on your laptop.  I know the company I work for has a policy against this and requires that user's tunnel into the VPN to access their files on a share.  Of course many people choose to ignore that rule, but it happens anyways.

Also ask your IT guys if they have and/or recommend specific software for travellers.  Where I  work, we offer both DriveLock for an extra layer of protection and PointSec disk encryption for those with sensitive data.

Lastly, the OP mentioned not worrying about wireless security at home.  If you have neighbors, worry about it.  It take someone who knows what they're doing like 5 minutes to lock your wi-fi LAN down with WPA-PSK/TKIP...  It's simpler than WEP and more secure.  I don't think any wireless gaming consoles support WPA yet, so go with WEP if you've got a Sony PSP or something.  Again, if you've got a work laptop then your IT dept may be willing to set up your router and laptop security for you.  And if so, they would also show you how to set up any other wireless machines you want to connect.
 

Or just don't broadcast your SSID, and make the router only give out the number of ips that you have in devices.

If you can't see the network, you can't get to it.

If you can some how guess it, you can't access it.

Much better than encryption IMO. Encryption is a back and forth battle. One day it will take only a few minutes/hours for people to crack WPA, just like WEP is today.

 

 

Actually I'd say to encrypt, disable SSID broadcasting, and limit DHCP to a set number of devices, toss in some MAC filtering, and whatever other tricks you may want to toss at it.  But the conern I'd have is the simplicity in connecting to your own router, or allowing a friend to connect.  Most people don't know enough about wireless security to deal with anything more complex than typing in a password when prompted.

That's where I get lazy |o.O|

For my router I use at home I just don't broadcast my SSID. Of course, I use WIDZ and SNORT as well.

 

 

Setting up a proxy at home is a great way to remain secured on the road but it's not always easy to set up.

For a simple and secure set up, you can install Logmein Free at home and log in to your home PC from the road and have a secure connection. It's a bit clunky but it works well and is extremely easy to install.

For people on the road all the time or for PCs that touch the internet on a continual basis, I highly recommend the use of a utility called Deep Freeze.

As far as setting up a secure connection back to your home network or office, I would swallow the work required to set up a VPN end point.  You can get VPN end point routers for peanuts now.  A very good one is the Netgear FVS318.  I just don't like having to depend on third party resources for my security.  Also, I've read some of these third party utilities for secure tunnelling are not totally bug proof.  If you don't want to deal with carrying a laptop with a VPN client installed, there are a some VPN over SSL concentrators on the market.  Netgear has one....SSL312.  Or you can use a Cisco ASA 5505 set up as strictly a VPN concentrator.

Encrypting files is always a good idea.  A very good freeware file encryptor is called TrueCrypt.

With respect with wireless network security, you can do all the aforementioned things like turning off SSID broadcasting, use of MAC address filtering, static IPs, and most importantly wireless encryption with the latest algorithms.  A step extra which can be done is to set up an isolated subnet for only wireless devices.  I have this right now where my high security zone...namely my wired network....is on a separate subnet totally isolated from the rest of my network via a firewall.  The next step I'm going to implement is to require network authentication for all wireless clients.  I'll do this with requiring a VPN tunnel and X-Auth authentication.  So if you bust into my network, you're not getting squat or going anywhere unless you tunnel into my firewall.

I second TrueCrypt. I use it on all my laptops for all of my data.

Just a side note for anyone using TrueCrypt, if you attempt to Ghost the drive, the encrypted "file" doesn't copy over properly (or at least the 3 times I've had it done). It will become corrupted. I don't know if this was intentional or not, but it was really annoying to find that out the hard way. Sort of weird how that happens. You'd figure it's just all 1s and 0s.

 

 

root:

I second TrueCrypt. I use it on all my laptops for all of my data.

Just a side note for anyone using TrueCrypt, if you attempt to Ghost the drive, the encrypted "file" doesn't copy over properly (or at least the 3 times I've had it done). It will become corrupted. I don't know if this was intentional or not, but it was really annoying to find that out the hard way. Sort of weird how that happens. You'd figure it's just all 1s and 0s.

 

 

Thanks for the heads up on the Ghosting issue.

My last school uses Deep Freeze... It is a great security tool. I don't know if it was just a standard setup or not but the way they had it configured was if the computer was not hooked up to the network it would not operate at all... this of course is remedied by getting a new hard drive for it but at least it does have  some security for if your computer is completely stolen....

 

sooo long story short, my last school uses deep freeze if they like it it should be good for you.

Speaking of laptop anti-theft devices, this one is interesting:

http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/story/0,10801,59091,00.html 

As I said, interesting.