When you are alone on your computer at night, surfing the internet, you will sometimes have a tendency to believe that being on the computer will make you totally isolated. As if no one in the world, would be able to violate the inner sanctity of your computer. But unfortunately, this is not true. When we use our computers on the internet, there are many ways that people are able to access all of our inner thoughts that we put down in digital format. Even though we may believe that our data will always be secured, it can only be that way if we work at it. When most people think about their security being violated on the computer, they mostly think about black hat hackers coming through the line remotely from another part of the world. But this not always the case. A large percentages of security breakdowns in a wireless network, happen when the perpetrator is only a few yards away from the actual network. So how can we stop this from happening. How can we keep people from accessing the network with our explicit permission. In this article, we will give you a few ways that will allow you to keep your network secured.

In Windows 7, the network security features have been made to be more effective. If you go into your control panel, you will see a wide overview on the different states of your home network. You can check the network that you are connected to and you can also create homegroups. Homegroups are a specific settings that will allow you to decide such matters as who gets to share certain data items on your computer. If the visiting computer on the network is not part of the homegroup, it is not allowed to access that part of your computer. This a good first step, but will only keep parts of your network safe. To really be sure that you are secured, we must take a look at the router.

There are a few steps that you must take with the router, so that you are sure that no one can access your network without you knowing. The first thing that you have to do, is to make sure that you change the username and password that gives you access to the router. Make sure that they are not on the default setting that they were in when you bought the router from the store. After you have done that, make sure that you have an encryption layer set up for the router. You can use WEP, WPA. or WPA II. We recommend WPA II, since it is the upgraded version of the most secured network encryption out there. Now after you set the encryption layer up, if anyone want to get on your network, they have know the password that you set up. But that might not be secured enough for your taste. You can also go in the router and set it so that someone has to have a particular MAC address to get on the network. MAC addresses are the unique number that is on your network card. Every device that connects to the internet has one. They can be spoofed, but someone would have to know your network card to be able to get the right number that will allow them on your network.

So as you can see, there are several levels of home network security that you can set up. Make sure that you do, so that you can truly surf the web secured.

People like to feel secure in anything that they do. If you drive a car, you want to make sure that it is not going to have any problems while it is on the road. You do not want to stop at a red light and the brakes do not work. The same thing applies when you are riding on an elevator. When you press the button to go to a certain floor, you expect it to stop at that floor and to not keep going. People would like that same feeling when they surf the internet. They want to be sure that when they connect their computer to the network, there will be no one trying to get into their system. They have heard all of the horror stories and have watched a ton of movies that describe the antics of black hat hackers. The average user knows that an attack on their computer can cause them financial problems. These financial problems can last for a long time. So how can you keep intruders off of Windows 7 as you surf the internet? One of the best ways is to download and install a firewall on your computer.

So you might be wondering what a firewall does exactly and how can it keep people off of your computer. Well, there are a couple of ways that we can answer that. A firewall is a program that monitors the incoming and outgoing traffic from the internet. It does this by looking at the ports on your computer. The ports are what allows your computer to have a bridge to the outside world. We could go into a more technical reading of how the ports work, but all you need to know, is that it allows the internet to come to your computer. So a firewall will close off the ports that you are not using. For a program to use a closed port, you have to give it explicit permission to do that. Once you have gave it permission, then that particular program will be able to communicate with the outside world as well. Your browser, and IM clients, are all examples of programs that use a port to connect to the internet. Using a firewall will stop any bad programs from using a port and keep allowing the good programs to continue working.

There are several ways that you can have a firewall monitor your computer as you are working. The first way is to activate the firewall that comes with your wireless router. Most modern day routers will come with a firewall already built into the firmware. You can go into the routers admin menu and set this up. If you do not surf the internet with a router and use a modem only, you can download a software firewall to protect your computer. There are several of them out there. You can read on Google which one’s are highly regarded and make your decision from there. Also be aware that Microsoft Windows 7 comes with a firewall pre-installed. You can activate it and have all of the protection that you will ever need.

As you see, a firewall is a good ideal while you are surfing the internet. Make sure you have one in place so that you can be sure that you are secured.