Do you have a wireless router on your network? Whether you're talking about a home or office network, a current form of encryption is absolutely essential to your network's security. What is encryption? Effective encryption turns your network signal into gobbledy-gook that only authorized devices can understand. If you don't have effective encryption enabled on your network, you're leaving an open door for hackers to "watch" your protected health information (PHI) come and go over your network. Maybe your router has wireless capability, but you're not using it--should you still be concerned? Yes! Just because you aren't using the wireless capability doesn't mean the hackers won't.

So what is "effective" encryption? What is out-of-date or "ineffective" encryption? When you look at the administration pages for your wireless router, you may see a number of options for encryption or security:

• WEP is better than no encryption at all, just like a screen door keeps out the rain better than no door at all. In other words, for our purposes, WEP is worthless. If this is your only option, you need to upgrade/replace your router before you transmit PHI.
• WPA is generally considered secure, but only if you use a long passphrase. Since you should only have to enter the password on rare occasions, there's no reason not to make it as long as your equipment will allow, and as random as possible. This will run anywhere from 14 random characters up to 63 characters. If you want to generate a random password for your network that the experts say no one will be able to crack, visit this page. The rest of that site is a great resource for computer and network security information and tools, also.
• WPA2 is even more secure than WPA, largely because it uses a more advanced encryption protocol (set of rules). If all your equipment will support WPA2, by all means use it, again with as long and as random a password as you can muster.
• Both WPA and WPA2 come in Personal and Enterprise versions. Unless you know what a RADIUS server is, stick with the Personal versions. They'll be fine for your needs.

Before you go changing your wireless connection from open to encrypted, make sure you're accessing the router via a wired connection. If you change the setup of your router via a wireless connection, as soon as the setup is changed, you will lose your connection. Get wired first, then make and test your changes.

You may find that older wireless cards may need newer drivers in order to utilize WPA and/or WPA2. You should be able to download these drivers from the website of the card's manufacturer. If you have trouble accessing the setup for your router, instructions for that may also be found at the manufacturer's website.

After you've implemented WPA or WPA2 on your wireless network, you can feel a little more confident that you won't be violating HIPAA laws or putting patients' data in harm's way.