Do you run a home office or small business office network? Do you have a wireless network access point installed in it? Do you have an always on, broadband access? If you answer yes to any of these questions, you can benefit from reading this guide on how to practice safe computer networking in the home and small business office environments.
With the price of computers and networking components continuously dropping, many more of us have a number of computers networked at our homes. This is especially true for those who are working either part time or full time from home, and even for others who simply maintain a home office to do additional work at home. With the proliferation of WiFi technology, networking computers is no longer limited to computer professionals and enthusiasts, and can be accomplished by any casual computer users in a very short time.
Unfortunately, getting the computer network to "work" and having all of the computers in the house connected to the Internet—which is what most of us have as "the" reason to network our computers—is not good enough. With an always on broadband connection, those networked computers and their contents have now been made accessible to many computer hackers and crackers who use the Internet as their playground. Consider your tax return document, which was previously sitting alone safe and sound, tucked in somewhere in a folder of your desktop computer. Because this computer is now connected all the time to the Internet, this document is now a potential target for someone out there to discover, to copy, and to distribute. For a tax return document containing a lot of your personal and private information, that's definitely not a good thing.
Take a look at Diagram 1 below, which depicts a very typical but unsafe setup. The grey boxes in the diagram are network devices, such as a cable or DSL modem (1), a WiFi access point with network routing capabilities (2), and a network switch (3). Oftentimes devices (2) and (3) are combined into a single device, a wireless cable DSL router with a builtin switch. The rest of the diagram show two laptop computers (6) connecting wirelessly to the Internet, one laptop computer, two desktop computers (4), and three other computing devices (5) connecting via the home's structured wiring infrastructure. This diagram is a blueprint for a future disaster.
There are several problems, some of which may be very obvious to you, with the setup depicted in Diagram 1, which I would call the unsafe networking setup.
Problem 1: "Always On" Connectivity To Malicious Hackers
The first, and perhaps most obvious problem, is that all of the computers in this setup are accessible almost directly from the wireless network and the Internet, protected only with a thin layer of the builtin security features of the wireless access point. Most people do not even change any of the factory preset configurations of their wireless access points. There is a great likelihood that the builtin firewall capabilities of the wireless access point is not even activated, leaving the entire network fully accessible by anyone—including neighbors, strangers, and passers-by—using the wireless network, and, with a little bit of ingenuity, by someone out there on the Internet.
Problem 2: The Neverending Work To Keep Them Up To Date
The second problem is that of higher cost of upkeep and maintenance. To protect against unwanted intruders, people would install anti virus and firewall software applications on their desktop and laptop machines. This means that you must obtain licenses for those software applications for each and every machine, and you must monitor these machines to make sure that these software applications are up to date.
When you just have to do this with a single desktop or laptop computer, this may be manageable. But when you have a few machines that are all vulnerable to viruses, information theft, and other forms of intrusions, this could turn into a full time job to which you don't desire to sign up. Without the proper upkeep and maintenance, sooner or later one of the machines will be out of sync with the latest security update, and become compromised, either by a virus, adware, or through some other form of intrusion. Worse, the problem could then spread into other machines in the network which you thought are safe.
Problem 3: Can I Install My Own Firewall Software In My TiVo?
Third, some of the machines in this setup are network appliances which, although they are still network hack-able, may not allow the installation of third-party security software applications and may not have any builtin protection either.
You may have a digital video recorder, such as the TiVo, which, although it may not look like a computer, it is one that could be networked with wires or wirelessly. You may also have a digital media streamer, like the SqueezeBox, or a digital media jukebox, like the Archos JukeBox. In the near future, many of us will even have the refrigerator, the stove, the coffee maker, heck, the entire house, run by computers and wired to the network. Every one of these computing devices would become a soft target with the unsafe network setup. In this case, even when contents alteration is made very difficult and near impossible to execute, because the appliance system platform has been hardened, the fact that their contents can be remotely accessible without the proper authorization and access control is unacceptable.
