The first thing I asked her was “How many devices do you have connected to this router?” Her answer was a phone, a laptop, a single TV and a printer.

She told me she had a bandwidth capped plan that was massively exceeded but swore she never did much on any computer. She approached me one day and said her cable internet bill was several hundred dollars one month and several hundred the next. My Favorite Hacking StoryĪ few years ago a lady that lived across the street from me knew I was the neighborhood geek. Or people try to get into your networks……….because they can. It’s my considered opinion that a lot of these intrusions are just designed to make your computer a bot to carry out massive denial of service attacks against other networks. But there is no shortage of people out there who who probe networks or ports looking for ways in.

And the nation states really don’t care about you unless you’re up to something. The point is that most of those intrusion specialists could care beans about you. Even if you are a network security specialist, there are people out there or nation states capable of getting inside your network. Configuring both pfSense or OPNsense requires some level of geekiness and a bit of research to give yourself some modest amount of security. And the success of them depends a lot on them being configured correctly. Before i get started here I need to make some clarifying statements. Some years ago I discovered hardware firewalls and have not looked back since. If you dig around that site a bit you might even see my name there in a place or two! Full Disclosure If you don’t believe me take a few minutes to peruse. Not that it would matter anyway because its security is roughly as porous as Swiss Cheese. Don’t let that scare you though.Īnyway, your Walmart router sits on the shelf near the TV and never gets updated. Both are free operating systems based on FreeBSD Unix. In this blog I’ll be discussing pfSense vs OPNsense.

There is only one real way to have any semblance of home network security, and that is to have a hardware firewall. Then you attach a wifi router to it that you bought from Walmart or Target or even worse, one that the internet provider gives you. Essentially you buy internet from a provider who gives you a modem of some sort. I don’t think most people give home network security much thought.

Firewall pfsense hardware