Picture: The Importance of a Good Firewall

I noticed all of those connections are on a NIC/LAN interface. A little birdie told me you’re not a fan of wireless, but I thought it my duty to mention that while these exploits exist regardless of your connection type, a plethora of others are brought to light over the radio waves. So many times we see people go buy a pretty blue box with antennas on it, bring it home and plug it up, and watch their computer flash and connect with utter windows delight! While I personally try to keep abreast of wireless vulnerabilities your run-of-the-mill end user doesn’t really have to do a whole lot to secure and monitor a wireless network at home. Easy modifications that can easily be made on the GUI to vanilla router and AP configs can be a great start:

- static IPs (mentioned in this original post) - MAC filtering - Time based access restrictions - High level encryption methods - effective more so when coupled with authentication - preferably NOT located on the network device, but rather pointing to a secure server’s database

And for those of you who would like to go past your router’s GUI, tools like Kismet and backtrack are great for seeing connections from all network sources and all protocols.

If you have one of those linksys WRT54g router, (just like about half the population does) lots of different firmwareis out there to expand its capabilities.

And for god’s sake - beware the claims of 802.11n - it’s not a standard yet, and there’s a reason why.

So, if you think you’re prone to attacks on the wire, check your little blue box with the ears sometime.

Have faith Guy - the wireless revolution is upon us and may just drag you in kicking and screaming. The devices you use to heat up your pizza and one you use surf the internet are both useful AND dangerous.