[Vision2020] Add-On to Comments about Computer Security

[Art Deco]

I should have mentioned this yesterday.

If you have wireless router as part of your home or other computer system, you can monitor the traffic in a primitive way by watching the port activity indicators on the router.

For example, if you are the only one in your home that should be going through the router at a given point in time, but the router indicators show activity on more than one port, your router is being used by someone else.

Sometimes this extra use maybe is just someone who has found your Wi-Fi connection and is just using it more or less innocently to access the internet.  The main downside of this kind of activity is that part of your bandwidth is being used.  This may not be a problem unless you are uploading or downloading large files.

The problem with an unknown user on a private wireless router is that the intention of the unknown user cannot always be immediately ascertained.  When an extra port is apparently being used, a cautious person therefore will either disable all router ports except the one they are using (if this is possible with a given router) or turn the router off for a period -- inconvenient but maybe not as inconvenient as suffering a successful hack.

W.
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