Wi Fi. WPA2 PSK best practices.
Was about midnight, and I was surfing the web as I typically do.
Noticed the WiFi was showing a lot of activity (the antenna symbol LED very active), which seemed unusual. My PC is connected to the router via hardwire, so know it couldn't be me.
Did a walk around the house. Everyone was asleep, and I verified all the devices that could be running WiFi were turned off.
Looked at the WiFi router again, and yep, was blazing away with lots of activity!
Therefore, time to upgrade from WEP to something more secure. Decided to go with WPA2 AES, and a full-length password.
As a security precaution I also like the idea of not even having WiFi on when we are asleep or not home. The WiFi router I have doesn't have the ability to have scheduled times the WiFi is on/off, so I have to do it manually (which is a pain, and I forget sometimes). Eventually that will be a feature I look for in the next WiFi router I get, once the one I have eventually wears out and needs to be replaced.
EDIT 2013-07-06 - WPA2 PSK best practices
Did a lot of googling and reading up of articles on WPA2 PSK best practices, and watched youtube videos of how it can be compromised/cracked.
1. Ideally choose a maximum_character_length password that is random characters (not dictionary words, to thwart dictionary-based attacks).
2. Make sure the MAX_LENGTH random password has at least one character each of (a number|a punctuation|an upper case letter| a lower case letter) to make they keyspace the largest (which makes the possible number of values an attacker would have to try to be too computationally expensive for the 'casual' Bad Person to try).
3. Change the SSID name to also not be a dictionary word, and the longer and more unique, the better. (The SSID is the wifi router 'name' that shows up when you fire up a PC or laptop and 'look' for your WiFi to connect to.)
a. Steve Gibson has a very cool internet resource for helping people learn about password strengh: https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm
b. Steve Gibson has a very cool internet resource for generating MAX_LENGTH WPA passwords: https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm
c. A relatively easy way to generate a max_length WPA2 password is from a *NIX command line ==>
openssl rand -hex 32 | less
d. For the above "c", as in "1" and "2", make sure to change at least one character to be Upper Case (ABCDEF...Z), and also change at least one character to be a punctuation (!$@%^. etc). When you are done tweaking, make sure the final password is length 63 (as of this entry, 63 is the MAX_LENGTH that can be used).
e. Is a good idea to generate and deploy a new MAX_LENGTH WPA2 PSK key every year, or every two years.
f. No one can hack your WPA2 network if wi fi is OFF. If you can, turn off the wi-fi when you do not need it (when sleeping, not office hours, or on vacation, etc). Some wi-fi routers allow setting up a schedule for having wi-fi on. Only have it on when it is being used.
g. This post is intended is just to remind myself and share with anyone that reads it that the idea is to keep 'casual' Bad People from exploiting your personal WiFi. Any entity at the governmental level (NSA/FBI/CIA/local law enforcement/Professional Bad Guy) would just likely tap a broadband connection at the wire level, or through your ISP, where none of this encrypted WiFi stuff applies.
EDIT 2013-12-22
Per this wikipedia article about bits of entropy and password length by type, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength, I now understand why a 64-digit hex password is the size to use. 256bits of password entropy == 64digit hex passphrase.
EDIT 2014-01-01
Debian command line programs for Wi Fi. To list out the Wi Fi signals that your Debian PC/Laptop can detect:
robert@debian:~$ /sbin/iwlist scan
https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse
EDIT 2014-01-06 adjusted 3f and 3g.