One of the most under-appreciated features of the Hownd WiFi service has been the native security measures in our hardware and software settings. Consumers presume security and business owners think a password is enough security, so we follow a security-by-design approach.
Network Security
Starting with consumer expectations, we isolate each device on the network from one another. While this means a group of gamers can’t start a LAN party in your business, it also means a malicious virus can’t spread from one person’s computer to any other device on the network. This mostly happens unintentionally, where a virus uses a network to spread on other unprotected (by default) computers. We isolate that.
More maliciously, most business networks have other computers on them as well as point-of-sale systems and other business-essential devices. Things you don’t want a casual customer to access, tamper with, or quite easily delete.
The amount of businesses that we see that have a network that allows guest access and does not change default passwords on their routers is astonishing. Consider what would happen if your point-of-sale system configurations were deleted. Or even more common, someone logs into your wifi router and changes the settings and locks access to the internet from your own business.
Close to 95% of routers are configured with the default settings. Want to test it?
Right now, go type 192.168.1.1 into a new page in your browser.
Login: admin
Password: password
We handle this by running a firewall to block access to the IP range of your existing network.
For example, if your network runs on the 192.168.1.0/24 range, the Hownd WiFi router runs its own DHCP server with a different IP subnet, and all access from the guest subnet to 192.168.1.0/24 is blocked. Internet is accessed through NAT.
For situations where you have additional subnets on your local network, you can (and should) set up a firewall to isolate the traffic between our router and the rest of your broader network.
