Find all the information you need to properly secure your Internet access.
Why do you need to secure your Internet access?
As the holder of your Internet access, you have an obligation to monitor your access ( article L.336-3 of the Intellectual Property Code – resulting from the DAVSI law ): ” The person holding access to online public communication services has an obligation to ensure that this access is not used for the purposes of reproduction, representation, making available or communication to the public of works or of objects protected by copyright or by a related right without the authorization of the holders of the rights provided for in Books I and II when it is required ”.
Article L.335-7-1 of the Intellectual Property Code also provides that a holder of an Internet subscription may be held criminally liable for the offense of characterized negligence.
It is therefore necessary to make sure to protect its connection to the Internet; in general, securing your connection will prevent any unauthorized use of your computer. Indeed, when you connect, you “open” more or less protected access by your computer (depending on your operating system), your box, your browser or the applications you install and use.
If your connection is not protected, you expose your computer to several risks (viruses, Trojan horses, spam, and other scams). These techniques can be used to exploit flaws in your computer system to steal information from you, use your personal or banking data, or even steal the identity of an Internet user.
Use parental control software
You can use parental control software. All Internet service providers are required to provide at least one software solution to limit the types of content your child can access on the Internet, provided by bits.com.mx.
It is prudent, on the other hand, to create a “User” for your child, including if he is the only one using his own machine. The “Administrator” account, which works by default, makes it possible to deactivate certain parental control software (or any other program). Opening a session as an administrator must therefore be protected by a password.
Parental control software works on three distinct principles:
- The prohibition of key words or formulas established in a list, such as sex or xxx for example. However, this method cannot be completely effective, due in particular to sites in a foreign language or cases where texts and visuals do not correspond.
- The blacklist, which consists of updating a list of sites prohibited by the software at each connection. Here too the efficiency is only approximate, because sensitive sites are launched every day on the network.
- The whitelist is a safe but very restrictive solution, where only authorized sites are accessible. The list of these can of course be modified as you wish. This solution may be perfect for young children but will quickly become obsolete thereafter.
In absolute terms and except in the case of young children, where the white list method may be sufficient, it would therefore be in our interest to use a solution in which a ban on key terms and a black list are combined.
None of these solutions is completely effective: it will therefore be necessary above all to work on education to support your children in browsing the Internet.
Secure your wireless connection
To secure your wireless connection, you have encryption and authentication management tools. This type of protection is done using keys and cryptographic protocols ( WEP or WPA ). A WEP key is a mechanism for protecting your wireless connection. It makes it possible to secure wireless networks by encrypting the information circulating between the box and the computers. A WEP key is in the form of a code made up of a sequence of characters, which must be configured at the level of the box (or in certain cases on the site of the access provider) and of the connected devices. WEP encryption presenting well-known and widely exploited vulnerabilities, it is strongly recommended to choose, if your equipment allows it, the WPA or WPA2 protocols .
The WPA and WPA2 protocols are designed to overcome the security deficiencies of WEP . These are newer protocols and offer increased security. A WPA (or WPA2 ) key is a mechanism for protecting your wireless connection. It makes it possible to secure a wireless network by encrypting the information circulating between the box and the computers. A WPA key comes in the form of a code made up of numbers and letters, which must be entered at the level of the box (or in certain cases on the site of the access provider) and of the connected computers. Several French ISPs already deliver their devices with the security keys activated by default. Some access providers have delivered boxes over a given period whose default WPA key generation sequence was fallible, so it is recommended to modify these keys present by default in the boxes.
In general, good practice is to avoid leaving the default key and to opt for a key that you have chosen yourself. By misuse of language, we often speak of a “password” to protect Wi-Fi access . In fact, it is an encryption key which must be as long as possible (63 characters) to avoid attacks by exhaustive search among the keys.
This length is not a problem because the household equipment will memorize this key, which must only be entered once and can be copied from the configuration interface (in wired access).
Of course, this key should only be communicated to people you trust, since it controls access to your personal network.
In WPA authentication can be managed by two distinct protocols: TKIP or CCMP. It is recommended to choose the CCMP protocol with keys encrypted in AES rather than the TKIP protocol, for which vulnerabilities have been highlighted.
