David wrote good stuff there which I totally agree with.
There is one thing that you are not addressing when you think of
routers protecting. A router's primary form of protection (firewall)
is through NAT. But that's like locking the door to your car but
leaving the windows down. It only protects you from Blonde Jokes.
The greater risk, and why a computer-based firewall is important, is
with mobile computing. At home, with your own private little network,
a permanently based computer is not really all that much at risk. But
if you have a laptop and take it with you and log into ANY public
network, you run a much greater risk.
You never know if that guy sitting over on the other side of Starbucks
or McDonalds is running sniffer software and then launching an attack
into your computer. I myself have the software gadgets to do this and
I wear no hats, either black or white. As an experiment, I attempted
to do this (in the privacy of my own home with test devices/computers)
and was able to get the username and password on another computer from
the other one when I logged into a popular site. Now, granted, I was
able to do this as I ran an isolated test bench with no other users on
it, so I didn't have to filter very much, but the bad guys have
already filtered out what doesn't matter.
Combine this open network thing with network spoofing and it gets even
more interesting. Especially with "open" networks setup as "Dlink" or
"home" or some such standard out-of-box settings. Many people will let
their computers/devices automatically attach to said devices and end
up getting violated. What really compounds this is if you setup a
"Home Network" on your computer. Most people use the same naming.
Well, guess what--the bad guys know this and will have their hacking
computer looking for these standard network names and as a result will
be able to access your shared drives.
It gets even more interesting with smartphones. It goes by different
branding names, but the one my cell provider calls it is "Wi-Fi Now".
Just say no to it. Please?
AG
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