For some days, my internet connection was down. Today, an employee came to reset my service. I have a wireless connection. Then, he said he had to “encrypt” something.
He opened the configuration profile in the radio connection tray icon, went through network type: access point, network name and then to a tab named “enable data security”. Then he wrote some numbers in the key slots, the result is “data encrypted with key 3”, from the 4 key slots.
So, I guess that now my internet connection is working with encrypted data, something that wasn’t working that way before.
What does that means? Do I have to worry about some sniffing from my ISP? Am I going to lose some properties or something, or do I have to continue working as if nothing happened?
(I have nothing out of law to hide, but here is a small town and… one’s afraid of gossips )
It’s kinda hard to say without some more details, but, yes, wireless data is generally encrypted (it doesn’t HAVE to be, but it’s so easy, no reason not to really). Again, without any details, my guess is that your WAP probably get screwed up and dropped the encyption key. The employee, probably just looked at your computer, found out what it was, and reset it on the router, or just made up a new one, and reset it on the comptuer and the router. No big deal really.
Since you’re the end user, you should probably request a copy of that key so that if this happens again, you can fix it yourself. Just make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Like some amoral user who wants to listen to all of his neighbors’ traffic.
Good replies but based on the tenor of your post you may not follow them.
With wireless, anybody driving by your house with a laptop and a wi-fi card can pick up your wireless signal and piggyback on your bandwidth. Worse, they can look at what’s on your computers if you haven’t put any protection in place. You can either add protection with Windows security at the folder level, or you can encrypt data sent on the wireless network.
You can configure your wireless router and your computer to encrypt data that is sent over the air. You provide the same key to both. Some require the key to be entered as hex codes (hexidecimal, or base 16), and some allow ASCII (just type in any characters from the keyboard). If this tech did that (it sound like he did) without giving you the key he is incompetent. It’s your equipment. You need to know the key. On mine you can’t recover the key, you have to reset everything and start from scratch.
The ISP cannot use the key to sniff anything on your computer.
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