Product Reviews

As wireless in the home becomes more prevalent, so do concerns about security, and McAfee's latest foray into the consumer security market tries to tackle this. Assuming that your router and network cards are supported, that is - the McAfee website has a compatibility list. Even if yours is on it, you may still need to update the router to the latest firmware.

After installation, McAfee scans for any unprotected WLANs within range and offers to secure them. The process involves a few key clicks entering passwords, and completes within minutes. As this product is aimed at the wireless security illiterate who hasn't changed the default router password nor SSID, if your neighbours happen to have a similar router with the same unchanged defaults you could find yourself unwittingly

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securing their network and locking them out. Using a non-default and non-obvious SSID during the process will avoid this potential problem.

McAfee also offers the option of secure key rotation during installation, preventing the hacking of static keys. This is hard-coded for a three-hour rotation cycle. Better than none at all, and fine for WPA, but not so good for WEP. And if you add a non-Windows device to the network, like a PDA, the key rotation gets disabled.

There's also the issue that McAfee has chosen to default to a WEP installation. To get proper WPA and WPA2 protection, you have to manually change the settings. So what's the difference in doing this with your router interface and doing it through someone else's software? Forty pounds and an ongoing £10 annual subscription.

It's the value proposition that sits worst of all with us. Forty pounds gets you a five-user licence, but the average home-computing setup isn't likely to need this. Setting up WLAN security needn't be difficult these days - see our guide to wireless, p136. Ten minutes and £10 invested on the technical support line should get your around any hiccups that do occur.

Ultimately, it's more effective and often easier to brave your router's interface, use WPA, hide the SSID and enable MAC address filtering. Then buy a decent Internet security suite such as ZoneAlarm.