Am I open to risk?

Hi folks,

I've got a small home network consisting of a Netgear DG811 modem/router
with 2 desktop PCs and a wireless access point hanging off it. One of
the PCs is my old PII and the other is the AMD64 based machine which I
have built recently.

I was having problems with the AMD64 machine accessing the Internet. I
could see most sites but couldn't read my email on Hotmail, couldn't
send email via gmail and couldn't log in to my company's remote Outlook
site. The PC is running Sygate Personal Firewall so I tried turning this
off and Hey Presto, everything worked fine. A bit more investigation
showed that the firewall was blocking traffic from the router's IP
address. I therefore set a firewall rule to allow all traffic in both
directions between all the IPs from my router up to the Access Point.

The internet connection now seems to work fine but my question is: have
I opened myself up to attacks from the outside world? I have a limited
number of Port Forwarding rules set on the router (VNC, BitTorrent and
NetMeeting). Will this protect me sufficiently?

Cheers,

Martin

> The internet connection now seems to work fine but my question is: have
> I opened myself up to attacks from the outside world? I have a limited
> number of Port Forwarding rules set on the router (VNC, BitTorrent and
> NetMeeting). Will this protect me sufficiently?
>

If the rules are exclusive then you'll be alright to all intents and
purposes from attacks from the outside. However, it wont stop the likes of
trojans and "spyware". I'd be slightly concerned about netmeeting but only
because MS wrote it, so that's a bit of a biased opinion.
The best bet is, don't download silly files form BT and have a secure
password on VNC and your firewall rules you should be alright from 99% of
worms and script kiddie scanners.

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 15:12:00 +0100, Martin <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>Hi folks,
>
>I've got a small home network consisting of a Netgear DG811 modem/router
>with 2 desktop PCs and a wireless access point hanging off it. One of
>the PCs is my old PII and the other is the AMD64 based machine which I
>have built recently.
>
>I was having problems with the AMD64 machine accessing the Internet. I
>could see most sites but couldn't read my email on Hotmail, couldn't
>send email via gmail and couldn't log in to my company's remote Outlook
>site. The PC is running Sygate Personal Firewall so I tried turning this
>off and Hey Presto, everything worked fine. A bit more investigation
>showed that the firewall was blocking traffic from the router's IP
>address. I therefore set a firewall rule to allow all traffic in both
>directions between all the IPs from my router up to the Access Point.

The firewall from AP or Wifi router should be sufficient. You can
disable firewall in your pc(s).


>The internet connection now seems to work fine but my question is: have
>I opened myself up to attacks from the outside world? I have a limited
>number of Port Forwarding rules set on the router (VNC, BitTorrent and
>NetMeeting). Will this protect me sufficiently?

Do you use WEP encryption?

--
WebWalker