Ports away

In the last issue we looked at firewalls – what they do and what they protect against. They’re a critical part of your home’s cyber security, keeping rogue hackers and programs from using your internet connection. But firewalls don’t discriminate, and they will block legitimate programs as much as illegitimate ones, and sometimes you have to go into your firewall and create an exception for a program that you do want to be visible to the internet.

As we discussed in the last issue, it’s fairly easy to do that on a PC – whenever the program starts you’ll probably get a popup asking if you want to allow the program access to the internet. But your router is a firewall as well, and although the router