Monitoring your network

Have you ever asked yourself this question: If hackers can get in, how would I know? There are many answers to this question and it also depends on the operating system that you are running. But first we'll start off with your hardware.

Your modem and router monitor ingoing and outgoing traffic. So we need to look in them to see what information is going out and in. You can go into your router by simply typing in your default gateway address into the address bar and then, when prompted, put in your password. Now you have access to your router. You can go to ‘Logs’ to see what information is being sent out and coming in. This is a good way of telling if you have unauthorized programs running on your machine. If you are being quiet (all browsers closed, nothing running on the computer) but something is still dialing out, this is a good sign of a bot or a virus and now you can go looking into what exactly it is that‘s running on your computer that you didn‘t know about. The next thing would be your modem. You can log into most modems by typing 192.168.100.1 into the address bar (you won’t need a password for this) and go to ‘Event Logs’. This will show you the packets that are coming in and going out and will even help you on channel strength. The main thing here is "the quieter you become, the more you can hear."

So let's say you are worried about a bot on your computer. If you are running Windows, there is a simple program called "deeptide" that listens for this information. Bots dial out on certain IP's so if those IP's are being pinged and you are being quiet, you know you have a problem. But what if you have someone in your neighborhood that is attacking you? How would you know? You can look into programs like "attacker" and set up a trap for them if they are scanning the network with "nmap" and other tools. You can make it look like you have more ports running open than you really do and if they attack these ports they are logged and you will see the attack and the IP associated with it. The same can be done by looking into the router or modem.

I do not claim to be an expert and there are probably a lot more things that can help you to control and monitor your network, but this should get you on your way. It's one thing to attack a network and another to know when you are being attacked.