DENVER -- Do you have a computer and a wireless router that lets you use that desktop or laptop anywhere in the house? If you do, you might have forgotten about a little security feature that keeps other people from getting into your computer.

With computer security expert Mike Siebels, Consumer Champ Bill Clarke drove through a Highlands Ranch neighborhood looking for possible victims.

"Just driving through a neighborhood with a laptop and a wireless connection in it and it will locate devices as we go," Siebels said.

Clarke and Siebels looked for homes that were unprotected, potential victims of a cyber home invasion. They looked for home computer networks by scanning the wireless links inside homes.

With some unprotected networks, Siebels was able to go on the Internet with someone else's computer.

"I'm on the Internet right now through these folks over here in this development, through their wireless router," Siebels said.

What he did was perfectly legal, but sometimes access of that kind could turn ugly. How much damage could he do?

"I could actually access their computer and wipe their hard drive completely out through a format command," Siebels said.

With wireless routers, you can hook up computers all over the house without cables. But too often, users ignore the simple steps to activate the routers' built-in security systems.

"Out of the box they plug it in, they go to the Internet and walk away from it," he said.

That leaves the whole computer system open to invasion from anyone just driving by.

Siebels and Clarke drove through the neighborhood, picking up several unsecured access to wireless networks. How much would it take to fix this security breach?

"About five minutes inside the router, setting access control and encryption," Siebels said.

At the shop, Siebels showed how easy that was. First, he found the router's IP address in the manual that came with it. The IP is a series of numbers you can type into your Internet browser.

"That will give us access to the internal software of the router itself, where you set your access and encryption," Siebels said.

And once you've told the router the code it needs you can set it and forget it in just a couple of minutes. And you don't have to be any kind of computer genius to do it.

If you think that's too much trouble, remember that otherwise, your front door is wide open.

Siebels has laid out these simple steps to make your home wireless network secure.

1) Connect the router to your computer using a hardwire connection.

2) Set the access controls to your particular unit per the instructions in the manual.

3) Encrypt using what's called the WEP.

4) Enter the code you receive in your laptop or desktop computer.

Will these steps make your home network absolutely secure? Of course not. Nothing will do that, not even with a hardwire hook up. But by using encryption, you've made your system far less vulnerable to someone parked outside your home tapping into your network and doing serious damage.