This will make some of the networking savvy among you wince, but for the longest time, I’ve had my home WiFi router open to anonymous connections. I figured leaving it that way was a little karma for all the times I’ve been fortunate enough to find an unsecured hot spot when I needed one (like when I first moved into this house, for instance). I run the usual virus protection and firewalls, of course. And I keep my OS up to date, but I left the hot spot open for those who might need it in a pinch.
But either someone has been sucking my bandwidth dry or my router is dying a slow death. In either case, I finally got wise and hardened things up a bit. I didn’t go so far as limiting by MAC address. But I did configure WPA-PSK on everything. The setup was actually easier than I expected (fear that it would be difficult was another reason I hadn’t bothered).
If it turns out that the router is part of the problem, I’m going to replace it with an AirPort Extreme and hook my LaCie drive up to it so I can finally get at it from both laptops.