How To Secure Wireless

The Eldorado Hotel Casino Reno Enhances Guest Experience With Fast, Secure ...

The Eldorado Hotel Casino features timeless luxury and friendly, personal service in the heart of Downtown Reno.  Named "Best Rooms and Suites" by Casino Player Magazine, every detail has been considered in order to provide guests with the stay of a lifetime.  Now with fast, reliable and secure Internet access, HD TVs and Movies for each guest, personal entertainment, browsing the web, and staying connected to family and work just got easier. 

"We saw that there was a change in our guests' priorities when they choose a hotel.  Guests are becoming more and more technology focused these days.  High-speed wireless is now the most requested item on their list for access to the Internet while using their laptops, smartphones, iPads, and other mobile devices," said , Hotel Director, of the Eldorado Hotel Casino. "Our guests can now enjoy our Internet access to stay connected with friends, family and work. Next on our guests list was HD TVs and movies.  Many of our guests already have HD TVs at home and have come to enjoy a high-definition movie experience.  And now they expect the same when traveling.  We are proud to now provide new HD TVs and movies for our guests."

The Eldorado teamed with Hotel Internet Services (HIS) to deploy a state-of-the-art property-wide 802.11N Wireless network as well as a new HD Video on Demand Movie system.  , president of HIS, commented on the importance of providing guests these amenities: "By survey, Wi-Fi is the number one requested amenity now.  The Eldorado Casino Hotel wanted to provide a wireless system that would provide their guests the ability to stay connected on a fast, reliable and secure network.  Additionally, the Eldorado wanted to upgrade their movie system and TVs so that their guests would be able to enjoy HD movies and cable programming just like they have been accustomed to receiving at home.  The new HD Movie System has a large selection of Hollywood Blockbuster HD movies, and allows the Eldorado to provide other valuable services though the TV such as Express Checkout, Weather, Ordering Meals, Shopping, Promotional Channels, E-concierge Services, Guest Surveys, Guest Messaging, and much more." "The Eldorado has made a significant investment in these technologies for their guests which will certainly set their hotel apart!

How to Secure Your Wireless Router

If someone goes on the internet using your wireless router and commits a crime, you probably won’t be found liable. You will, however, get a visit from the police and they’ll treat you like the perpetrator until they learn otherwise. If that seems fine with you, consider this, they probably won’t come at 2pm in the afternoon with a polite knock on the door. They’ll come at 2am, with a battering ram, and have you handcuffed on the floor in your pajamas wondering what the heck is going on.

All because you failed to secure your wireless router.

Years ago, all you had to worry about with an open wireless network was that someone was going to slow down your Internet connection. These days, criminals are becoming savvier and looking to use open wireless networks to commit crimes.

Security through obscurity – hackers can’t break into something if they don’t know it’s there. The first thing you need to do is turn off broadcasting of the SSID – that’s the name the router goes by. When you turn off broadcasting, you can’t “look” into the air to see what routers are available.

By changing the name, someone can’t guess the name of the router as they fish for routers to connect to. If you left the name as “netgear” and turned off broadcasting, someone can blindly connect to your router because they know it’s name.

The second thing you need to setup with your router is encryption. WEP stands for Wireless Encryption Protocol and it’s the older, less secure sibling of Wireless Protected Access (WPA) – go with WPA or WPA2 if you can because WEP can be cracked fairly easil y. You’ll have to look at your router’s instructions to know how to set this up.

Another reason to secure your wireless router and use encrypted communications is to prevent someone from “packet sniffing” your data. Since wireless signals are transmitted through the air, anyone nearby can collect that data and read it. Encryption is important because it makes that data unreadable (or at least very difficult to read).

When selecting a password for the encryption key, be sure to use strong passwords – like you would a bank account.

Finally, you can tell your router which devices can connect to it. MAC stands for Media Access Control and each wireless device (technically the network interface) has a unique MAC address that identifies it. By giving your router a list of MAC addresses that can connect, a random device can’t connect to your network even if they were to break the encryption.

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