You??™re
normally safe from and immune to the e-mail, web browsing, music downloading,
and normal traffic because that network traffic is well defined and flows between intended
sources and destinations just fine??”your ISP??™s routers and hundreds of others
along the Internet keep it away from you.
Your ISP may tell you that it filters a lot of bad Internet traffic and that you are
safe using its services, but in reality, if your ISP filtered the Internet, you would not
have a real, whole Internet connection or experience. Many ISPs block some Internet
services??”to prevent or at least make it more difficult for you to host web sites, mail
servers, or file servers on your home connection??”but there are many ways around
those restrictions, and none of those restrictions can do much to prevent abusive,
exploitive ???robots??? from wandering around loose looking for vulnerable places to
land.
The threats you face are hundreds if not thousands of tiny programs running
on others??™ computers that do nothing but poke and prod and probe looking for
soft spots such as unprotected computers and networks. When these robots find
a soft spot, they may not exploit it directly??”instead, they may report back to a
master robot, which then commands other robots to infiltrate potential victims. If
you appreciate science-fiction drama, you??™ll appreciate the actions of the Internet
underworld.
If this is getting a bit scary, let??™s tone it down a bit by enabling that firewall
feature in the router and, for good measure, the firewall of Windows or add-on
product such as ZoneLabs ZoneAlarm or Norton Internet Security.
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