Offense Wins Games, Defense Wins Championships
Offense wins games, but network defense wins championships. Praise God for that. It’s half time right now so all the players are chilling and catching their breath. Today’s half-time entertainment will be going over some film to give your home Wi-Fi some championship-level defense.
Gary Payton II pulled up after his dad asked him to take a chill pill from playing defense in the NBA so he can school us rookies on how to lock down the other team from breaking into our home Wi-Fi network at the crib. Once you learn this stuff, you’ll also find the Wi-Fi at your crib going on a 21-0 run on kicking hackers out.
How could a brother be so cold like that? Things like identity fraud and hacking in various ways are now very common. There’s big money in it, so here are some ways you can avoid having to deal with that. All they’re trying to do is secure that bag. It’s all good, though. Some gems on locking down your home Wi-Fi network fresh out of the oven.
Use A Long, Complex Password
Without having the basics of defending there’s no stopping anybody from dunking on you. When you’re hooping a good defensive stance will the first step in keeping the rock from going through your net. Likewise, a complex, long password with uppercase and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters will get your defensive fundamentals on point.
Changing your password regularly will also get you some easy stops and lead to some easy buckets on the other end of the court. Typically, it’s good to change your passwords at least every three months. If you’re doing the same, predictable things on defense your opponent’s going to figure it out and adapt to your defense. Brute force password cracking tools are used to automatically get your password. If you have a super complex and long password, and you’re changing it all the time then you’re pretty much set. It’s going to be far more difficult for tools like that to get any passwords quickly. And even harder for the other team to game plan for you.
Choose the Right Form of Wi-Fi Encryption
When you’re running back to defend you’re looking to guard your assigned player on the other team. Probably because matching with other players may lead to a mismatch and make it way easier for the other team to score. I’m sure you’re not looking to gift the other team free buckets. The All-Stars that are reading are looking to rename the other team into the brick squad. If you’re a big forward or center stay in your lane and guard the other big so that the guards blow by you all day everyday. And if you’re a guard or wing you probably don’t have time to be playing bully ball by the other team’s bigs.
And that brings us to encryption. Your home Wi-Fi must scramble data en route to its destination so that if anyone’s watching your traffic they’re not seeing it in plain text that people can understand. Most wireless devices, like your Wi-Fi router, connect to wireless networks with these encryption methods: WEP, WPA, WPA2, and WPA3. The equivalent of an easy, high-percentage bucket like a layup, or in your case the most secure way to encrypt your wireless traffic, is to use WPA3. At this moment, not all devices are compatible with WPA3. If that’s how it is then WPA2 is your second scoring option if your leading scorer’s getting double teamed and can’t get a bucket.
No one should be using WEP or WPA. This is the equivalent of Hack a Shaq. Shaquille O’Neal is a boss in the paint and a legend in the league, but those free throws from the line won’t always fall. You want your encryption to not miss, or in this case be easily broken into. For this reason, dodge the WEP and WPA2 encryption on your Wi-Fi, fam.
Hide Your Wi-Fi Network Name / SSID
Your squad’s point guard copped all of the coach’s plays. Your PG does not want to be caught playing both sides by telling the other team the plays that your team’s about to run.
That brings us to hiding your Wi-Fi / network name or SSID. While there are tools that can reveal hidden SSIDs nearby, it’s good to have another layer that an an intruder has to get through. You’ll typically find this in your Wi-Fi router’s wireless or Wi-Fi settings when you’re setting up your Wi-Fi name and password.
If You Only Have a Modem Get Yourself a Router
If you’re playing team ball, then the whole squad’s coming to the trenches to provide help defense when needed. Though isolation 1-on-1 basketball used to be more of a thing decades ago, it’s no longer getting teams those Ws. Help defense is covering for your teammate that hopefully didn’t get their ankles broken after they got beat. This gives them time to switch and defend another player to make scoring not so easy.
Likewise if you’re on the Internet without any protection then you’re just asking for problems. It’s like charging into a battle without any armour. You’ll be playing without your squad fully healthy. This leaves an opening for any device to access your network, watch traffic that is unencrypted, and just generally exposes you to many exploits or tricks from an intruder.
Only Allow Specific Devices
Let’s say your team’s getting torched by a player who always goes right, who then dunks on four of your squad’s players. Look away when he’s yelling and start thinking about how to keep that from happening over and over. Your coach make cook up a strategy to just force that player left to help their team lay more bricks.
That brings us to filtering devices, also known as MAC address filtering. Though it’s not bullet-proof, it can help. This feature lets you only allow certain devices that you want to allow. This filtration is usually done by a device’s MAC address, which uniquely identifies each device that’s talking on the Internet. Any other device trying to get in should not be able to use your Wi-Fi network if you’ve got this set up.
Again, it’s not bullet proof, but another layer that has to be broken through by an intruder. People out here have tools to mimic these MAC addresses and dunk all over your Wi-Fi network anyways. MAC address spoofing is one technique that can be used to mimic a MAC address that’s allowed on your network. This would grant the hacker access into your network since your Wi-Fi router has allowed that MAC address to use your Wi-Fi.
If Prompted for a Firmware Update Never Accept It
Some of us have probably been caught in the air from biting on some pump fakes. There are players that have ran through the league using pump fakes as one of their main weapons. Players like Kobe back in the day or Jimmy “Jordan” Butler nowadays.
As long as you’re locked in and you don’t jump, it’s all good in the hood. If mans sees you biting on the bait and jump then you’ve opened yourself up to trouble on many dimensions. Some of those include, a wide open shot once you’re out of the way, higher chance of gifting up a foul, or the humiliation of an and-1 play if you not only foul the brother while the ball hits nothin’ but net.
This brings us to firmware upgrades. Believe it or not there are tools that can hijack your router’s firmware and make it do things like trigger a firmware update. Cool, no big deal.
The problem with this is that there are tools out here on the Wild Wild Internet that allow you to not only customize, or hack, your router’s firmware, but also make back door access into your Wi-Fi network. Tools like OpenWRT are typically used to pull this off. If you’ve seen a phising email before, then this is the same idea.
Usually it’s safe to accept automatic firmware upgrades once your router prompts you, but do not always trust them for the reasons above. Instead, go to your router manufacturer’s website and download the firmware from there. Do it manually because you’ll be downloading the firmware yourself and knowing that it’s coming from your router’s manufacturer, a source that you can trust. Once you download it you can log in to your Wi-Fi’s router admin interface and upload the firmware manually to upgrade the firmware.
Revert Your Router’s Firmware
None of us are made out of money, especially these days. If you think you took an L and have some sus router firmware, it’s not all over. Most of us know how to factory reset our home networking devices, but sometimes that doesn’t get it fixed up the way it was when you first bought it.
If your router’s acting out of pocket you don’t necessarily have to get another one to wipe the slate clean. There is a way to undo what just happened. Most Wi-Fi routers should have the ability to do a firmware rescue or revert your router firmware. You can find out how to pull this off by checking your Wi-Fi router’s manual. Leave a comment if this tip saved your credit card a trip to Amazon or your local electronics store.
Set up a VPN on Your Wi-Fi Router
It’s a sad day if your coach is betting on getting that W by using the same plays over and over. The other coach will catch on and adjust to the plays and run up the score no problem. There’s no guessing where the ball will be at each point of the play.
This brings us to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). A good chunk of Wi-Fi routers are strapped with the ability to route your data through a VPN server. This protects and anonymizes the devices that connect to your Wi-Fi. In addition, it puts your router’s IP address on lock. Any traffic from your network is encrypted, or scrambled, while going from your router and the VPN server.
So if mans has a tool like WireShark and is watching your network traffic they’ll be looking at data that almost looks like gibberish and is difficult and time-consuming to unscramble.
Your Router’s Manual
You all know about the Hall of Fame. All of your favourite players are in there. The best of the best at hooping. The ballers that every other player likely models their game after. These fellas have made a big impact on winning or are respectable ballers.
Likewise, if you want to go undefeated when it comes to your home Wi-Fi then look no further than your router’s manual. The manual resembles the San Antonio Spurs when they were beating everybody in the 2000s and 2010s. To casual viewers they didn’t look too flashy, but they played selfless, winning ball. Led by Tim Duncan quietly running up the score with some solid, fundamental moves and collecting 5 rings in the process.
Your home Wi-Fi router’s manual drops bars like it just finished a 12-hour shift at the steel factory. It covers things like setting up your firewall, hiding your Wi-Fi name or SSID, and routing traffic through a VPN for a layer of anonymity and encryption. All you have to do is find out your Wi-Fi router’s model name and add “manual” to search up your Wi-Fi router’s manual. For example, if you have a TP-Link Archer AXE75 router, simply search “TP-Link Archer AXE75 manual” on Google and access TP Link’s website to find either the user guide or manual for that router.
How Good Defense Will Get You Some Ws for your Home Wi-Fi Network
Know any other ways to play lock down defense on your home Wi-Fi network? What are they? Which one is the most important one to keep the other team from going hard in the paint and getting easy buckets? What’s the best run you’ve witnessed in hoops? Whos is without a doubt the best defender the league has been blessed to see? Leave a comment and share the content, fam.
