For businesses, network routers have become a very essential thing, especially with more and more businesses making the transition towards digitalization. Network routers can be considered as the post office for the communication that takes across a business office. The routers allow the entry and exit of information on both local area network and wide area network (internet) and almost every business office houses at least one network router.
As mentioned, these routers are very important to any business since all the important information that is being shared across the network is dependent on these routers and it is imperative that best security settings should be used for the router, otherwise, you will be providing a potential gateway for the attackers to hack your network. Best security settings for network router security include establishing strong passwords, introducing access control lists, and ensuring the router is physically secure from unauthorized access. Let’s have a closer look at these security settings:
Strong Passwords
For network routers, home routers, or any other routers, strong passwords are required because they provide an authentication mechanism through which anyone can access or join the router’s network. It is necessary that after you set up the router, you change the default passwords, both admin and WiFi passwords to a unique one that cannot be guessed by anyone. You should enter the default gateway address of your router in the address bar of a web browser i.e 192.168.254.254 and from there, configure the password.
The password that you are setting should be at least eight characters in length composed of a combination of alphanumeric characters. The password should be known to you and the IT department of your business and it should be changed several times during the course of a year to keep it secure. Even allowing the rest of the employees access to the router’s login console isn’t the best idea so, avoid sharing the password with many people.
Access Control List
Access Control List is a feature that is available in most routers nowadays and it allows an expert to establish a list based on different rules to block certain types of traffic from entering your network. For businesses, this is a very useful feature because they are always susceptible to attack by hackers and they are always at the risk of unauthorized traffic to the network.
With the Access Control List feature, a filter list is made using a number of criteria including network address and protocols. When this feature is enabled and in place, then based on the list access-list created, it allows or blocks certain types of traffic to the network. Since this is a bit technical, only the IT experts should be allowed to change its settings because a lot of things should be taken into consideration such as network topology and the protocols, documents points of entry, etc when setting a control list.
Event Logging
Event Logging is a feature that is available in most routers nowadays and it logs all the changes made to the interface and configuration of the router. Nowadays, the use of event logging has become important for normal network management and security auditing methods to know if any unauthorized activity took place on the network or not.
Event logging is very useful to ensure that nothing on the network is happening without authorization and everything is according to the normal business operations. Before setting up event logging, you should set the correct date & time for routers because, in this way, it will be easier for you to review the activity. Just like any other setting, this setting is also done through the router’s login console which for most routers is 10.0.0.1.
Physical Security
Just because you have set the optimal router configurations does not mean that you shouldn’t limit the security to those only. For network routers, physical security is as much important as the settings and you should always place the routers in a secure room where it is not accessible to any unauthorized person and there should be proper access controls involved to let users enter the room including fingerprint scanning, palm scanning, card-swiping in the card reader, etc. All of these security features will help to keep your business network router secure.
