Consider the story of one Buffalo, New York man a cautionary tale.

The man’s house was raided by agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency last week, which later turned out to be a mistake. The reason? Department of Homeland Security agents traced a distributor of child pornography back to the man’s home Wi-Fi router.

The trouble was, the man wasn’t the one distributing the illicit and illegal material -- authorities say it was his neighbor, who was connecting to his Wi-Fi network. The agents didn’t have the wrong house, but it took them a week to determine that they had the wrong suspect.

For the less tech savvy among us, protecting an Internet router can be a daunting task, requiring technical know-how that gets confusing. But with just a few seconds, the router’s manual, and some understanding of what you’re looking for, setting up at least some router security can be pretty easy, and can save Internet users from issues like identity theft and an unfortunate visit from the U.S. government.

Here are a few tips for keeping your network, and your data, away from those who would hijack it:

These are simple steps you can take to protect your network, your data and your privacy, but the technical aspect often frightens off people who aren’t familiar with their Internet hardware. Trust us when we say that it’s usually less complicated than it appears. Consult your router’s manual if you need to, and look for the keywords in your router’s settings menu: things like “encryption key,” “firewall,” “disabling broadcasting and IP” and “MAC address filters” are good. Once you set them up and write the numbers down, you should be able to breathe a little easier knowing your access to the Internet is protected.