I'm not sure that I would be all that confident in what your ISP will do to harden your router to prevent a recurrence. First, the router itself, if supplied by your ISP (and even if not) may have intrinsic vulnerabilities, including a backdoor which will enable your ISP (and possibly anyone else who can hack it) to do whatever they like to it.

You should start by setting your own login user and password to that router, instead of allowing the default one to remain. There are a number of other things you should take care of, including making sure you have WPA2 encryption set for wireless, and creating a very long password string consisting of random characters from all over the keyboard (mine is 40+ characters long) for that wireless key password, and disable any port forwarding.

Also, if your router has it, be sure to disable WPS. Read about that here.

To get into your router, enter either 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1. They are the most common addresses. Also see http://www.techspot.com/guides/287-default-router-ip-addresses/

If you give the name and brand of the router, we may be able to see just what it needs beyond what I've already suggested, as well as find the manual for it somewhere, which will enable you to find these different settings, and possibly do some other useful things to harden it.

Feb 28, 2015 10:47 PM in response to WZZZ

Many thanks. First I must say that after logging in to this group, the reply link does not work on either my ipad running IOS 8.1.3 nor my iphone running 7.1.2. Not helpful really. I have had to switch on my old laptop.

This is quite complicated for anyone like me to do. I was told by my internet provider to reset the router. This resulted in my not having internet or 4 days, until the engineer came to the house. I dont know what this engineer did, but the problem has gone for now. I am worried that it will re-occur if i mess with settings.

But thanks for this info.

Lynne

Virus