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By Root 4185 0

(although if you do, they'll exploit that, too), but because they can take control of your computer, allowing them to launch attacks that look like they are coming from your computer. A PC World article by senior writer Tom Spring reports that between 50 and 80 percent of all spam polluting the Internet is generated by these computers. Law-enforcement traces will turn up you, not the hacker, and it is your bandwidth that is being used to send all the e-mail, not theirs. One of the significant benefits of using a Macintosh computer is that there are few known viruses attacking and thus taking control of this operating system. PC users beware, though.

Nowadays, almost every router from the more reputable manufacturers has some degree of a software firewall and can be configured easily. If you're looking for sophisticated hardware firewalls, I encourage you to contact a local network engineer; the demands of setting up such a firewall are not insignificant, but the end result is valuable.

Consider the critical importance of securing your network from the outside. Take the time to protect yourself now, so that you are not stuck with authorities knocking on your door or your financial data being compromised.

Port Forwarding: Port What?

Before I go into what port forwarding is, you need to know what a port is. You might wonder how you can surf the web, send an e-mail, and FTP down a file from a remote computer all at the same time, without the data from each conflicting with the data from the other. Your use of the Internet travels via a port. An http request typed into your browser travels through port 80 on the server to which you're connecting, for example, and an ftp request travels through port 21. Gaming software uses other ports. E-mail typically travels through port 25; however, some Internet service providers, in an attempt to get you to use only their e-mail service, will block that port, and a savvy secondary ISP—usually the one with which you have your website hosting—will offer a secondary port number. This is the case with my ISP.

Ports can also work to route traffic to where you want it. For example, suppose your cable modem/DSL provider provides you with a static IP address of 128.176.0.12. As you might be aware, every website name is actually a representation of an IP address, and every time you type in Google.com, for example, your web browser goes to an Internet "address book," called a domain name server, and retrieves the IP address for that name, and returns it. Then, your browser requests of your ISP that you be connected to that IP address anywhere in the world. All of this happens in a split second. The IP address just mentioned is one of Google's IP addresses. If you were outside of your office and wanted to connect to your home computer, all you would need is the IP address your ISP provided you with and one additional configuration—port forwarding.

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NOTE

An IP address is the address that you are assigned by your Internet service provider. For example, using the White House, presume that every street in Washington DC has a numerical representation—1st Street is 01 and, say, Pennsylvania Ave is 132. And, with 50 states in the US, say the District of Columbia is 51, and the zip code for the White House is 20500. That would mean that 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC, 20500 would translate into an IP address of 1600.132.51.20500. Now, this is a concept only, since IP addresses are between 0 and 255, but you understand the concept. A generic IP address is something like 192.168.102.1. For your computer to make a request for a website, the website has to know where to send it. The IP address your ISP assigns you, whether static (that is, unchanging) or dynamic (meaning it can change every time you log onto the Internet), is how that information is delivered to you.

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In your network router—the box that connects your computer to your cable or DSL modem—you can configure various ports to do various things. Typically, all ports are closed from external access into your home