You have probably read about how people are able to gain access to an individual’s computer and essentially steal all their personal data. There are many ways that this can be done without the owner even knowing that someone is trawling around within their computer right under their nose. There a few simple steps that you can do to safeguard your personal information from internet predators.
Your home network is your first step to securing your personal data from the outside. You should have a secure perimeter network that stops any potential intruders from accessing your data. It is by far better to stop intruders at the perimeter rather than at your computer. Make sure that you have a hardware firewall enabled at the point where your home equipment connects to your internet connection. Hardware firewalls are more difficult to hack and do a good job of keeping unwanted eyes from seeing your personal computer.
A hardware firewall for homes normally comes in the form of a router. Some people have a modem connected to their internet connection but these do not come with a hardware firewall and are not secure. Make sure that you are using a router with a hardware firewall between your computer and the internet connection. If you are not sure which one has been supplied by your service provider, have a look at the original documentation or phone your service provider and ask them.
Most routers provided by internet service providers are wireless. This means that if you have a laptop, you can connect to the internet using a wireless network card from your laptop to the router, and finally out onto the internet. Even if you don’t have a laptop and use a desktop computer, the router from your service provider will still have the wireless functionality enabled. This wireless connection broadcasts a name called an SSID. This can be picked up by any wireless device normally within a 50m radius of your home. You need to make sure that the wireless broadcast is switched off if you do not use it. If you have a laptop and use it to connect to the internet wirelessly, make sure that it uses an encryption key to secure all communications. The older type of encryption is WEP and is now less secure; you should be using WPA which is more secure. Read the documentation that came with the router on how to configure encryption on your router.
By: Mike JJ Johnson
Posts Tagged ‘Internet Service Providers’
Securing Your Home Network
February 20th, 2010What Is The Real Difference Between LAN And WAN Computer Network Infrastructures?
January 8th, 2010
Although a business shouldn’t be confused on what the differences are between Local Area Network (LAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN) … too often those entrusted with finding a bandwidth solution for their business aren’t clear on these basic tenets of overall computer network infrastructure. If not completely understood it affects the quality and accuracy of the final decision. So … it’s important to get it right.
So …. in the interest of clarity here’s the real differences between LAN and WAN:
LAN – A local area network (LAN) is a computer network covering a local area, like a home, office, or group of buildings in close proximity to each other. Current LANs are most likely to be based on switched IEEE 802.3 Ethernet, or on Wi-Fi technology running at 10, 100 or 1,000 Mbit.
In general a local area network is made up of devices in local proximity to each other and has finite distance limitations. The LAN can be either wired or wireless but is only at a single location.
WAN – A wide area network or WAN is a computer network covering a broad geographical area. Contrast with personal area networks (PANs), metropolitan area networks (MANs) or local area networks (LANs) that are usually limited to a room, building or campus. The largest and most well-known example of a WAN is the Internet.
A wide area network (WAN) is comprised of multiple LANs connected to each other across distances. And example would be a corporate office connected to each of its satellite offices. This method of interconnection is handled via a third-party carrier — i.e. Qwest provides the wiring connecting two locations together.
WANs are used to connect local area networks (LANs) together, so that users and computers in one location can communicate with users and computers in other locations. Many WANs are built for one particular organization and are private. Others, built by Internet service providers, provide connections from an organization’s LAN to the Internet. WANs are most often built using leased lines. At each end of the leased line, a router connects to the LAN on one side and a hub within the WAN on the other. Leased lines can be very expensive. Instead of using leased lines, WANs can also be built using less costly circuit switching or packet switching methods. Network protocols including TCP deliver transport and addressing functions. Protocols including Packet over SONET, MPLS, ATM and Frame relay are often used by service providers to deliver the links that are used in WANs. X.25 was an important early WAN protocol, and is often considered to be the “grandfather” of Frame Relay as many of the underlying protocols and functions of X.25 are still in use today (with upgrades) by Frame Relay.
For professional help in finding just the right LAN or WAN solution for your business applications …. use the no cost assistance available through DS3-Bandwidth.com.
By: Michael Lemm
Improving Network Performance – An Overview of Network Availability Design
December 28th, 2009
Today’s companies, particularly those involved with banking and Internet hosting, require their network to be available 99.999% of the time. When the network isn’t available for employees, clients and business partners, the cost can be thousands of dollars per minute. Diversity or failover is a key component of any high availability strategy. It describes a backup device or link that is available should the primary device or link be unavailable.
Today’s e-commerce web hosting facility are designed with diversity for circuits, routers, firewalls, links, modules and servers. Each number shown corresponds to a single point of failure that is provisioned with some backup or diverse connection. Each server is dual homed to different switches should a Layer 2 switch or server link fail. The Layer 2 switches are connected with a Gigabit trunk. As well the Layer 2 switches are connected to multilayer switches with Gigabit trunks. That allows for link or switch failure. There is module diversity at all campus switches with dual supervisor engines. If the primary supervisor engine fails, the secondary activates and traffic is diverted across trunk lines to the adjacent switch once the spanning tree algorithm is run and the trunk ports are in forwarding mode.
Firewall failover is provided with a link between them that will detect if one of those is unavailable. Traffic is then routed through the active firewall. The routers are connected with a link that will detect when one of the devices is unavailable (HSRP). There are separate telecom demarcations at this facility, which provide diverse local loop circuits to different central offices. There are dual WAN circuits to different Internet Service Providers from those central offices as well.
High availability designs must consider the failover time at each point in their network. If a network application will timeout after 10 seconds then any failover point must be 9 seconds or less. For instance, spanning tree protocol (STP) will run when there is a topology change such as a switch or link failure. Design your network such that the link speeds, spanning tree protocol version and switch topology do not add an excessive failover time.
1. Different Internet Service Providers
2. Central Office Diversity with Diverse Local Loop Circuits
3. Router Diversity with Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP)
4. Firewall Diversity
5. Switch to Firewall Link Failover with Gigabit Trunking
6. Switch and Link Diversity with Gigabit Trunking
7. Switch and Link Failover with Gigabit Trunking
