Testing networks for security

There are some sites - like shieldsup - that offer to 'test' your security for you.

They are not bad, but ultimately computer security is a potentially very complex thing and cannot, in general, be made 'easy to understand for a newcomer'; no single site, or couple of sites for that matter, can check everything there's to know about security.

Then again, if you follow basic security guidelines you are likely to stay out of the worst. Basic security guidelines include, but are probably not limited to, having a personal firewall of some sort, or, if at all possible, at least a NAT router and preferably a real firewall; dumping IE and Outlook (Express), or configuring them well (but installing Firefox is a much quicker road to that end); regular updates; and not installing anything you find on the internet.

Joachim

Thanks Joachim I do use Firefox and Thunderbird already, have a NAT router which has some firewall capabilities. When you say use a "real firewall" do you mean a dedicated firewall box such as a 'smoothwall' variant ?

Regards Geoff

Okay, that should be good.

A 'real firewall' in this respect is mostly characterized by the ability to filter outgoing traffic. A NAT router will do pretty well on incoming traffic in most of the cases, but will not do anything to outgoing traffic.

There are also numerous other, more advanced things a firewall could do, but I think the above would be most critical. However, it does require a good deal more knowledge than a NAT router to configure properly.

And yes, a smoothwall box would fit this just fine. It should be a dedicated box.

Joachim