Linksys routers are a brand of routers manufactured by Cisco Systems, which deal with production and marketing of home and small office networking products. Apart from selling broadband and wireless routers, the Linksys brand also deals with consumer and small business grade Ethernet switching, wireless internet video cameras, network storage systems etc.
One of the ways to protect your network is by setting up a password for your router. In order to secure your Linksys router, first of all you need to sign into the administrator account. In case you forgot the password or if you are not aware of it, you can follow the instructions step by step, as explained below.
How to reset the password on Linksys router
Step 1: If you have forgotten the password for the router, the first thing to do is to reset the router to the default factory settings. In order to do this, you need to press and hold the reset button on the router for about 30 seconds.
Step 2: Once the router is hard reset, you would need to reconfigure it again. Before you go ahead and access the configuration page, you would be required to connect a PC to one of its Ethernet ports. It must be ensured that you have a cabled connection to connect to the router for accessing the administration settings.
Step 3: When you are through with the physical setup, you need to switch on the computer and wait till the home screen is displayed. Then double click on the Internet Explorer web browser or any other you installed on your PC. When the address window opens, click on its address bar to type in the address ‘192.168.1.1’, which is the default router address for the Linksys router.
Step 4: After entering the address and hitting Enter, you will be taken to a popup box that will ask you for your Login information. You are required to enter a Username and a Password which should be ‘admin’ for both the fields, in the case of a Linksys router. However, there are some Linksys routers, especially the old ones, where default username should be blank and the default password is ‘admin’.
Step 5: After you are through with the Login window by entering the User ID and Password information, you will be able to reconfigure the Linksys router. Here you need to go to the management tab and change the administrator password to something else. Make sure it is difficult enough for someone else who wants to access your router without your consent.
Step 6: Once you change the administrator password, you would also need to enable WEP or WAP security to keep your nosy neighbors away from tapping into your wireless network.
It is suggested that you do not avoid the above steps because protecting your network should be the first priority before logging in to connect to the Internet. Other steps that can be followed for ensuring added protection are MAC Address filtering, disabling SSID broadcast and enabling firewalls.
