To create an introduction to the next chapter, we will mention some things about the security of our system; things that you should do and things that you shouldn't do. Setting up your router to port forward connections is something that you should keep in mind. It is not exactly a security hole but you should not disable any firewalls for sure. Each router has a firewall to protect you and your whole local network from unauthorized users. Your ISP has a firewall too and obviously, your computer has a firewall. You can disable all of them and let your computer free on the internet, however, this is way too risky. So, the first security layer that you should keep in mind is firewalls and whether it is wise or not to disable them.

It is important to know that only a firewall will know if an incoming connection will be harmful or not. A firewall is something that checks every incoming connection, and depending on your configuration, it allows or blocks the connections. Sometimes, especially when we are playing games, this is annoying because for some reason, the connection relevant to the game is blocked and we are kicked out. So, people simply disable almost everything.

The next security layer that we will talk about falls under the question: From whom you want to be secured? We all know that the world is not safe, thus the whole internet is quite dangerous. No one can possibly say, OK now I am 100% secure. There is no such thing. So, the question is from whom you want to be secured. There are some layers here. First, you may want to be secured from your family. This requires you to simply create passwords and often this is enough. The next layer is to be secure from your friends. Obviously, this is about creating passwords but you also have to keep some things to yourself; for example, you do not want to publish your home IP address or the port that you are working on. The first step of an attack is called gathering information, so the less the attacker knows about your network setup, the better.