Modeblue

The World Wide Web is a dangerous place. It’s full of malware & spyware and viruses and hackers, all of which are looking to infect as many nodes as possible.

There are several ways of getting to the world wide web, but you need to go via the internet. If you’re using a home PC with a USB modem to logon, then you are plugging your PC directly on to the internet – your in direct contact with all the nasties flying around the internet.

This means you need to spend half your time patching your windows machine, and probably pay out for some Internet security product or a firewall, anti virus and antispam product, which in turn is probably hogging your PCs resources and making you feel frustrated with your now sluggish PC.

Connecting to the internet doesnt require you to attach direct to the net though – you can use a router to act as a first line of defence. By default all routers use NAT (Network Address Translation) which is effectively a way of allowing the inside (or “protected”) network to make requests to the internet without connecting them directly. They also have a firewall built in, which is set to allow all traffic from inside out and allow any responses to those requests, but disallow all traffic generated from the outside in.

Routers also allow you to share your connection with the rest of your house (or neighbourhood if you use wireless) and all go through a single route to the internet.

You can’t just buy a router and uninstall that Security suite yet, but you can relax the need for resource-sucking realtime scans and software application firewalls and you can be safe in the knowledge that the route to your PC is now protected with a solid hardware wall rather than a flimsy software door!

Personally I think all users should get a router and set up their home PCs securely behind it. But when it comes to internet security never forget the most common route for infection is via user requests, so stop opening those dodgy email attachments, and refrain from clicking those dodgy popups!