Business Awareness - Firewall needed

Small business owners and home users tend to think that because they are “just a small business” or “just a home user” no one would waste time trying to hack in to their network, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The idea is that, OK, they don't care about your data, but how about installing a small e-mail server for sending tons of spam from your computer? Or how about installing a program to attack a website? If you remember the days when Yahoo or Microsoft Update site were down, back then millions of inffected computers worked together to attack them. All you will notice is that your computer is a bit slower than it used to be.

Plus there are thousands of unscrupulous individuals (mostly kids looking for fame) out there who think its fun to disable your computer with malicious code. These guys strike randomly by searching the internet for open, unprotected ports.

You have a few options to protect yourself. First, if you are using XP or Vista, set up the software firewall that is included. This is not 100% bullet proof but it will protect you from outside attacks. What this firewall is not doing is protecting you from inside, for instance if you click on some pop-up and install some malicious software, this will be free in conecting through your firewall with his creators initiating the connection from you computer.

For this reason there are a lot software firewalls included in Internet Security packages like AVG Internet Security, Norton Internet Security, etc which are protecting you both ways... but the price is answering to a lot of questions like "X program want to access the internet, Allow or Deny?" AVG is less expensive and is very good.

Ideally you want to purchase a router to stand between you and the Internet. What the router does is translating your internet address into an internal one so the router is now exposed on the internet and you have a private address taken from the router - we call this Network Address Translation (NAT) and this is actually a basic firewall which will stop worms and enhance privacy by discouraging scans on your computer.