So far most of the technology talk in my blog has applied to business and not homes, but if you have a telecommuting workforce or employees who work at home at night or weekends to catch up on work you (and they) should be aware of some basic home network safety. 

For purposes of this forum let’s say you have staff who will work at nights or on weekends from home using your time and attendance, performance management, learning management, application tracking or other HR automation software.  This means they will be accessing and working with sensitive data like SSNs, home addresses, benefits information and payroll information.  Securing that data, even in your employee’s home, is important.

Below are ten tips I share with our own workforce to secure an employee’s home wireless network (a luxury almost everyone has these days):

1.       Change the default password for admin access to your router.  And don’t just change it; make it something hard to guess.  Use upper and lower case letters, a symbol and a number.  And make it ten characters or longer.  If you want to use your cat’s name as your password “FluFFyC@t2007” is a lot harder to guess than “fluffy”.

2.       Disable SSID broadcast.  You don’t need it and it provides no benefit whatsoever.  Name your SSID something you can remember so it’s easy for you to setup a wireless connection whenever you need to.  Following the example above you could name your SSID “FluffyW1F1”.  You can easily remember it; it’ll help you remember your password and no one will ever guess it.

3.       Use MAC filtering.  This can be a pain when you want to add devices, but it makes it much harder for someone to gain unauthorized access to your network.

4.       Turn off all inbound ports.  This will prevent requests originating outside of your network from getting in.  Any request you make from inside your network will get out and back no problem.

5.       Use the logging features of your router.  These are often kind of weak, but they are handy in more than one way.  You can watch for unexpected activity and it can be a great parental control.

6.       Change your router password every 30 days.  You don’t have to go hog wild when you chance it.  If it’s easy for you to remember fluffy use variations on that theme: Fluffipurrf3ct, 4MyC@tFluffy, etc.

7.       Change the default IP address of your router.

8.       Enable the highest level of encryption that you can.  WAP is better than WEP and WEP is better than nothing.  Change your encryption key at least twice a year.

9.       Set the max number of DHCP users allowed on your network to be the number of computers in your house.

10.   Back-up your wireless router settings.  This will help you quickly restore them if you ever have to.

Most of these things have to be done only once and then you’re done with them.  Take them extra 30 minutes when setting up your router (or even after setting up you router) to secure it as thoroughly as you can.  This is a case where an ounce of prevention... well, you know.  Maybe you don’t do HR activities like payroll integration, applicant tracking, employee performance management, employee training or any of the other common tasks HR automation and HR software take care of these days, but you’ll still benefit from a more secure computing environment.