Do you know if your home network has been setup correctly? Is your personal data safe? Do your network devices have the necessary security? These are just some of the many security questions you need to ask when you have your own network at home. Wired and wireless network connections are utilizing different types of network security. If you do your banking online, shop online, connect with friends, it is critical for you to review your network to ensure that all possible security holes are fixed. Just think of this, a hacker that exploits the security vulnerability of your network can be on standby right now to steal some valuable information from your computer.

You can say that your network is setup correctly if you have the basic devices to make up a network and have security features at the same time.

1. Modem - Provided by your internet service provider (ISP) that is the source of your internet connection. Depending upon what device model you have, it normally comes with a security for additional protection.

2. Router - Can have both wired and wireless capability, shares that internet connection. Some firewall serves what they call a hardware or software firewall. Stateful firewall (any firewall that performs stateful packet inspection (SPI) or stateful inspection) is a firewall that keeps track of the state of network connections (such as TCPstreams, UDP communication) traveling across it.

3. Wireless Security - The basic wireless security options to choose from is WEP, WPA and MAC address filtering.

Network security gives you two kinds of protection. First, protection against malicious software, like virus, spyware and other protection against hackers or people that can steal sensitive information from your computer. Your network security is only as secure as the unsecured computer in the network. Meaning if you have 3 computers and one does not have the necessary security, the whole network will still be vulnerable from hack attacks. A worm is a malicious code or software that spreads from one computer to another using the network highway.

Operating system link Microsoft Windows 7 offers some more protection like Windows firewall and Windows defender. These are the basic securities that you need to consider when doing your network security review. With this protection securely on all the time, you will have peace of mind doing your banking and purchasing online because you know that you are fully protected. Besides this, you should also be familiar on how to avoid manual virus and spyware removal on your computer.