Need to secure a laptop wifi connection

Sorry I didn't have the time to do a though search on the subject.

I need to secure a friend's laptop while she is accessing wifi at school or at her own home.

I'm not looking at keeping the CIA out but I'd like to lock out the casual roaming war driver or any nosy neighbors.

I need this to be transparent to her and low maintainence for me as she is decidedly not tech savvy when it comes to this stuff. I'm not much of a networking expert either LOL.

In other words, 'set it and forget it' if possible.

Thanx

At school you won't have any ability to do anything.

At home, just configure WPA personal.

All the security is configured on the APs.

{PMS}fishy said:

At school you won't have any ability to do anything.

At home, just configure WPA personal.

All the security is configured on the APs.

Click to expand...

If you want a little more protection than WPA/WPA2 (don't use WEP if you can avoid it) you can also use mac filtering and turn off broadcasting the SSID. Neither are great by them selves but the more protection the better I say.

ChronosKill said:

If you want a little more protection than WPA/WPA2 (don't use WEP if you can avoid it) you can also use mac filtering and turn off broadcasting the SSID. Neither are great by them selves but the more protection the better I say.

Click to expand...

Any sniffer can grab the SSID, and mac filtering doesn't stop anything other than people hopping on your internet. Generally, its just needless extra configuration.

Make sure she has a decent firewall and anti virus. That's about all you can do since you have no control over the network itself.

{PMS}fishy said:

Any sniffer can grab the SSID, and mac filtering doesn't stop anything other than people hopping on your internet. Generally, its just needless extra configuration.

Click to expand...

I don't know what kind of nosy neighbors you have, but I can promise no one in my neighbor hood has a sniffer.