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We spend a lot of time on customer networks around the Helderberg, and the same handful of weak spots shows up again and again. None of them are exotic. All of them are fixable in under an hour with the router you already own, and most take less than five ...

The good news: phishing is a pattern, and patterns can be learned. Here's what to look for, starting with the single most useful skill. The one skill: read the domain, right to left Look at this link: https://bank.absa.co.za.login-verify.com/secure Where does it really go? Read the domain from right to left, ...

Below are the settings that carry real weight, for the four major browsers. All of them are in each browser's settings page; paths are given for each. 1. Cookie and tracking protection: from "basic" to "strict" Every browser now has a tracking-protection setting that ships on "Standard" or "Balanced", which ...

What a VPN really does When you connect to a VPN, your device opens an encrypted connection to a server run by the VPN provider. All your traffic travels through that tunnel. To anyone between you and the server (the coffee shop's network, your ISP) your traffic is unreadable. Websites ...

What a firewall actually does Every piece of network traffic arrives at a door: an IP address and a port number. A firewall holds a list of rules about which doors may be knocked on and by whom. Traffic that matches an allowed rule passes; everything else is dropped silently. ...

This guide walks through the settings that matter, in rough order of importance. None require special software: just the router's admin page and half an hour. If you haven't changed your admin password yet, start with our home WiFi guide and come back. 1. Firmware updates: the unglamorous big one ...

The problem in one sentence Smart-home and security devices are the weakest equipment on your network, and they can talk to everything else on it. A budget IP camera from a no-name brand doesn't get security updates like your laptop does. Some ship with default passwords nobody changes, some phone ...

These are encryption standards. They define how the data travelling through the air between your devices and the router gets scrambled, so someone with a laptop and an antenna can't read it. Each generation fixed the flaws of the one before, and the old generations are still hanging around in ...

First, the part that's better than the headlines say Most of the internet is encrypted now. When a site shows the padlock in the address bar, the traffic between you and that site is scrambled end to end. Banking sites, email providers, social media, shopping: all encrypted. Someone sitting in ...

Most extensions are fine. Some are not, and the failures are instructive. When good extensions go bad Extensions get sold. A developer builds a useful tool, gains a million users, gets tired of maintaining it or gets an offer, and the new owner quietly pushes an update that turns the ...