Hacker attacks, from passwords to wi-fi: here are the tips on how to defend your home

Hackers don’t go on vacation and cyber threats are daily. To say it is Giuseppe Izzo, president of Uese Italia spa. “Italians suffer daily cyber threats of all kinds. They nestle in our smart TVs, in our IP cameras, in the wi-fi switches for the light, the so-called home automation, even in the voice assistant of smartphones and in the audio speakers”

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“With the increase of electronic devices, in short, families, mainly those with children, can find themselves defenseless in the presence of any malicious people.” defend, you just need to know a few simple rules.

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The first rule is that of separate the external network from the indoor one, creating, with the support of many home routers, a guest network for guests

To do this, “it is necessary to connect all the IoT devices to this network, and not to the main one, allowing to limit their range of action and therefore to mitigate the attacks of any malware and / or malicious people”. The second tip it is instead that of filter traffic: if there is a firewall in the router, it would be advisable to configure it so as to guarantee IoT devices only access to the servers of the respective manufacturer

“This would make it possible to avoid – warns the expert – that a compromised device can contact third party servers for the purpose of steal data or perform attack actions DDos “. Third rule: use only the local network. If you do not have particular need to control devices from the outside, “it is wise to configure your router to block the internet access of your smart devices, which will continue to function normally while we are at home, but which, in this way, will be effectively protected from external threats ”

These are three best practices as a defense weapon in a world that is always connected to the network: “Often we don’t realize it – says Izzo – but there is a multitude of interested parties in our personal data who has the right tools and knows very well how to use them to make them his own. The attacks take advantage of flaws in the system such as the Wpa2 Protocol, Heartbleed and Specter and Meltdown bugs, all potentially dangerous for a common household ”

The target of the hackers is to take advantage of the holes to enter the various devices to obtain money or other information to add to their archives for future use, such as blackmail or identity theft

But even in this case there are possible defenses: “The first intrusion channel is the modem or router: it is necessary first of all change the password the factory is the same for all customers of that particular telephone operator and, to withstand cyber attacks, it must be at least 22 characters long between letters (upper and lower case), numbers and special characters. It is estimated that 78% of users do not change their password and 79% are unable to change it ”

“Also the name of the network – warns the expert – it must be replaced with an unidentifiable name: it is better not to use your own name and surname, but vice versa fantasy network names that do not allow easy identification. For those who work from home and need a surplus of security, it is also possible to hide the name of the home network. This adds security because none of the neighbors and no attackers will be able to see it anymore ”

It would then be necessary guaranteeing security for surfing the net. “In recent years the vpn, an application to be installed on computers and smartphones with which a virtual private network is created. The purpose is to hide our browsing from hackers, preventing them from stealing information while we browse the web or while we access e-mail or our other accounts ”

For enhance the IT security of the home wi-fi network it is also fundamental restrict network access to family devices only. The trick increases the security of the home network since an external device, even knowing the access password, will not be authorized to use the internet

What if they were at home guests? It is recommended to “activate the guest network from the router and provide guests with access to this separate network from the one where the family devices access”