In these days of a highly connected world, security is a real issue. We already talked about the basic security configuration you should do on your router – setting up an access password and eventually disabling remote management.

As we mentioned, your router works as a firewall as well. It will block any incoming connection to non-standard ports. That’s why we need to open non-standard ports used by certain programs. The router default configuration is good for preventing people from playing online games, for example.

One interesting option all routers have is to block any ping request to your public IP address. Ping is used to see if there is any machine installed on a given IP address, and this technique is used to find computers on a network. If you disable pinging, people trying to find computers on the Internet using pinging won’t find yours. So, we recommend you to go ahead and check the “Discard PING from WAN side” on Firewall, Block WAN Ping. However, if you play online games, pinging is used to check the delay between you and the game server. In this case is better to leave pinging enabled.

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Figure 20: Disabling pinging.

Another important feature available on all routers is firmware upgrade. You should go to the router manufacturer website and download the latest firmware upgrade for your router and upgrade it. On our router this could be access at System, Firmware Upgrade. This will ensure that your router is protected from any security flaws the manufacturer has discovered so far.

All computers from your network should be safe by now from “the outside world”. Of course we are talking about hack attacks using direct IP techniques; you still need to use antivirus and antispyware software on your computers. If you install a Trojan Horse on your computer hackers may access it even though there is a firewall between your computer and the hacker computer.

You may want to read two tutorials we have already posted regarding security: Testing Your Computer’s Security and Protecting Your Computer Against Invasions.

Now that your network is set up and secure, you can go ahead and share folders and printers between your computers without being afraid of someone on the Internet having access to your files. Read our tutorial How to Share Folders and Printers on Your Network to learn how to share files and printers on your network, as it is the sequel of the present tutorial.