Five ways to assess your wireless network security

Network security requires ongoing attention. To keep your WLAN secure, it is important to be aware of new wireless vulnerabilities. You can identify and close any security holes before a hacker slips through them by performing a vulnerability assessment on your wireless network.

Discover wireless devices on your network including wireless routers and wireless access points (WAPs) as well as laptops and other mobile devices, is very important. The scanner will look for active traffic on wireless network. Then document all the data you collect from the scanner about the wireless device’s locations and owners.

Rouge devices are wireless devices such as an access point which should not be on your network. Take your list of devices which you documented via scanner and compare your known inventory of devices. Any equipment which you didn't recognize should be blocked from network access immediately.  

Make sure that WAPs on your network are just as secure as your routers and any other device that can be accessed from the Internet. Make sure to change the password to a hard to crack one. Check the WAP is configured to use the most secure options such as strongest available authentication setting and an encrypted admin interface, filters to block unauthorized protocols and send secure alerts.

Updating your device inventory is very important at this point. Update the device inventory to include every Smartphone, Tablet, Laptop, Desktop, VoIP phone and any other wireless device that is approved to access your network. You should find out if these devices are running the most current OSs and associated security patches, are running current antivirus software and configured according to your security policies.

Finally you should plug the holes which your vulnerability scanner reveals. Completing the above steps is not enough you should test your fixes and make sure that they closed the security holes.