Have you ever wondered who is on your network at home? Well businesses do all the time and usually with good reason as network intrusion is a big threat to the security of their work. We all hear the horror stories of ransomware and the huge payments that are being asked for the big targets.
Well it also happens to home and small office users too, usually the payments asked are not as big, but the impact to the target can be critical. With more an more of us working from home, we don’t have the big firewalls and security teams (let alone the budgets) to provide the same level of protection.
So what can we do?
1st has got to be good discipline, don’t go to sites that are suspect, don’t download files of dubious nature and certainly don’t open attachments and links in email unless you are really sure of their nature.
2nd is make good backups, keep at least 2 copies of all your data. Ideally one (or more) should be stored somewhere other than in the home or office. Cloud services are great for this but can get pricy and in some cases this can even open you up to attacks from their sites.
3rd have a good router, most of us use the basic router that came with the network connection from your ISP. Some buy newer shiny units. But these are all subject to attack regularly, so at the very least keep it updated to the latest firmware. Better get an opensource one such as PfSense.
4th keep yourself updates, like the router your OS, applications and tools all are being attacked regularly, so make sure you update and keep updating.
So what does this have to do with the intrusion on the title, well there are plenty of guides and information on the above cases, though I might well add to a few of these in the future. However one that doesn’t get much mention is how to know if somebody is on your network. This is where Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) come in. The big businesses have these deployed throughout their networks as they want to know when people are in their systems. For the home users it’s not so easy, so I have taken a few of the online guides and come up with an end-to-end guide from taking a standard raspberry Pi and document the installing, configuring and customising that can be done to make a small office/home intrusion system.
Does this sound interesting? if so go read the article here.
Pauls simple guides 