Broadband - Don't Get Burned

Before you connect to the internet at home, by far the most important thing you should have in place is a firewall.

Put simply, a firewall acts as a barrier between your private, home network and the internet. Browsing the web without a firewall is not a good idea, especially if you have personal or confidential information stored on your home computer(s).

There are two kinds of firewalls that, when combined, keep your home network near impenetrable, which means you can be happy in the knowledge that you're pretty well protected when browsing the net.

Firstly, there's hardware firewalls, the most common example of these are built into broadband routers; which more often than not are bundled with broadband provider's packages. Most hardware firewalls use either; packet filtering; a proxy service; or stateful inspection to control the traffic that passes through them.

The former of these is the most common and involves the firewall examining every packet (the small pieces of information that we send and receive over the internet) that passes through it and if the packet conforms to predefined filters then it is let through, otherwise, it is dropped!

There is a wealth of settings that you can adjust on your router, with the more expensive routers offering more sophisticated options; generally speaking though, the default settings will suffice for most home users.

The following is a brief list of some of the things a firewall will help protect you against:

• Viruses & Trojans
• Remote logins
• Application backdoors
• SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) session hijacking
• System bugs

As well as hardware firewalls, it's worthwhile investing in a software firewall too, which are often bundled with virus protection software. Such products range considerably in price and effectiveness.

In conclusion, if you have a broadband connection then you are all the more vulnerable to malicious activity as broadband connections are always on; therefore ensuring you have adequate protection is paramount. If you are not yet on the internet, then you should compare broadband packages online to ensure you find the most suitable package for you.

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