Whether at home or in the office, your wireless router out of the box is defenseless, which leaves your network of computers extremely vulnerable to malicious attacks. It may seem difficult and convoluted, but securing your wireless router is one of the simplest and most effective ways to protect yourself from malicious hackers, i.e., crackers.
CHANGE THE DEFAULT USERNAME AND PASSWORD
Your wireless router generally comes with a blank username and a default password, usually 'admin' or something similar. Unfortunately, no matter what brand you have, even the most novice cracker will know the default login information. If your network is not configured and is unsecured, all one needs to do is sit outside, hop on your router and make all the changes they want. By changing the default password, you have taken the first step to thwarting a hack attempt.
ENABLE ENCRYPTION
There are a few types of encryption pertaining to wireless networks. The most popular methods are WEP and WPA. Enabling encryption is the single most important security feature you can enable on your wireless router next to changing the router default password.
DISABLE SSID BROADCAST
A default config on a wireless router will automatically broadcast its SSID, which is basically the name of your wireless network broadcast indiscriminately to any listening device. For example, the default SSID for a Linksys wireless router will be 'linksys' and every device in the broadcast range of your router will see it. This simple security technique is not failsafe nor will it keep skilled hackers from seeing your network, but it is another layer of protection. If someone is driving by looking for wireless networks (wardriving), they won't initially see yours and will move on to routers broadcasting SSID. On the other hand, remember that you must manually enter the SSID name in order to connect any new computers to your network.
MAC ADDRESS FILTERING
Every network card has a distinct identifier assigned to its hardware which never changes. This identifier is called the MAC Address, or physical Address. MAC address filtering is another layer of security, although this method should not be relied upon by itself. There are simple ways to bypass this security method by even novice hackers. You must also remember to go to any additional machine you want to add to your network and retrieve its MAC address, then enter it into the router's MAC filter table and save the configuration before it can connect. This method is completely up to the router admin and is simply another layer of protection.
ENABLE A FIREWALL
Most routers have a simple, built-in firewall option which you should enable. They are not too configurable, but do a decent job for starters. Windows XP's built-in software firewall is limited, but provides at least some protection to your computer when connecting to your wireless device. You should enable some type of firewall on your computer before connecting to the internet. Some vendors who provide firewall software are Symantec, McAfee and ZoneAlarm to name just a few.
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BITTORRENT BASICS
Bittorrent is a nifty little file sharing technology which eschews the centralized file distribution system used by the likes of Napster and others and instead relies on a decentralized, distributed method.
Basically (very, very basically) Bittorrent works by downloading parts of a single large file from multiple clients (that includes you) who may have the entire file (seed) or are still downloading like you (peer/leech). You may be downloading parts of a single movie from 20 different people, some who have the whole movie and others who have parts of the file you don't. Also, while you're downloading a file, others will be connecting to the torrent and downloading from you the parts you have completed. You're basically putting together a complete puzzle by downloading whole pieces from multiple clients.
Remember, today's word is fileSHARING. Meaning the whole fabric of Bittorrent unravels if you don't share (upload). People who only download and don't provide any uploading are called Leechers. Also, your download speed may reflect your leeching by staying low.
A torrent is simply an announcement file uploaded by someone who has the file. That tiny little file gives your client general info about the file(s) and where to look for seeds/peers. Your client will then begin finding seeds and peers to connect to, start downloading as fast as allowed from those connections and announce itself to them and others.
With the basic principles out of the way, let's move on to clients and sites.
BITTORRENT CLIENTS
To use Bittorrent, you will need a client. A client is a small application which downloads torrents. I use uTorrent. It is tiny (about 175KB) and does not require installation. Following is a list of clients:
TORRENT WEBSITES
Once you have a client you need a place to search for and download torrents. Following are currently the best and most popular:
CONFIGURE UTORRENT
This is the difficult part. You must set up uTorrent correctly so it will optimize your download speeds. A default config could net you 20KBps download speeds instead of 200KBps! Note that in some cases you may very well see your ISP's fully alloted download speed, or close to it, with a default config.
Firstly, IF you have a router, firewall and static IP address on your computer, you should set your router to port forward. A port is basically a pipe Bittorrent uses to bond with Windows for transferring data. There are ~65,000 ports Windows uses. Some ISPs actively throttle bandwidth on common Bittorrent ports. This is a reason to port forward. Your firewall will also block incoming ports. This is another reason. You mainly want to choose a single port, set your router to forward any incoming requests for this port through your firewall and to your PC's static IP.
Go here to get your port forwarding on: Portforward.com
Portforward.com contains all the knowledge and wisdom you need. Plus I'd be writing for years what they have already done.
Next, you'll need to configure uTorrent. I'll be brief here.
That's pretty much it. You should be configured for optimum downloads.
BEGIN YOUR SEARCH
Now that you have a file in mind, a client and all the hit sites, you can begin your search for your file. To get started, go to Torrentspy. This site is one of the better ones because they have a comment system. Once you find a torrent you want you can view the comments below the download link. People will post messages about the actual file: Is it legit? Is it complete? Is it a fake? Is it a dummy file uploaded by the authorities? Virus? Etc. This is extremely useful when you're looking at downloading a 2GB file which could take several hours or even days.
At the top of the first page you have a big ol' Search field. This is where you should focus all your Chi. Type in something like 'vista' and hit Search. This will turn up thousands of hits on multiple pages. The more relevant hits are listed first.
Once you click on a torrent name, you will be taken to the download/comments page. Scroll down a ways and you will see the Comments section. You can weed through the comments and get a general idea of the nature of the file you'll be downloading. Once you verify that you want the file, click on the Download button. Your browser won't initially know what to do with the file and will open a window asking what you want to do. Choose the option to open the file using a particular application. Browse to the location where you saved the uTorrent.exe file (or whatever client you downloaded), select the .exe file, check the option to always open .torrent files with this application and open the file.
Your client should pop up next. If you're using uTorrent you'll be presented with the Add New Torrent window. Here you can view the target files to be downloaded, deselect files you don't want to download and change the download location. Click OK and uTorrent will begin connecting to Seeds and Peers and hopefully start downloading. Down Speed indicates your download speed.
HELPFUL LINKS
"Where in the heck did you come up with DMGHACK and what does it mean?"
DMG are my initials and hack on computers is what I do in my spare time. My last name is too complex for the average human mind to comprehend, much less remember, so I came up with the shortest, easiest, most memorable name while searching for domains: DMGHACK!
dmg hack or damage hack is also, apparently, a World of Warcraft hack. Sorry to anyone googling for info pertaining to this hack. I've never played WoW. I hear it's... fascinating.
This site is completely coded in CSS from scratch, except for the pix gallery. It's obviously a simple 2 column layout with a 3rd on top for banner and navigation, very similar to the 3 column 'holy grail' technique. It's floaty, DIVilitious and for the most part compliant. I'm not really a programmer, but do enjoy it, at least as far as websites go.
