A crash course in securing network devices from the guy who secures all The SSL Store’s network devices

A short time back, my colleague and tech blogger extraordinaire, Patrick Nohe, wrote an interesting article about the importance of securing routers and other end devices as they can lead to security holes for malicious jerkbags that may be trying to port scan, execute Man in the Middle attacks (MitM), and various other techniques to attack end users. It was a great, high level, “be ye forewarned” type of article to get the message out to this Lovely Audience (that’s you, you lovely audience).

Mere minutes after that blog’s release, Patrick and I agreed that I should step in and provide a little more of a technical explanation for securing such devices. Now, if you expect that I’m about to go through each and every device ever made to go over what should be done to secure it, then you clearly have no sense of the relativity of our time based on this planet. Or, in other words, who has time for that?

My intention is to give you a high-level overview—to discuss functions and features that are common to most/all devices, which should be tended to. Most options that I mention will be specific to routers/firewalls but some of these settings could certainly apply to other devices such as IP cameras or other IoT devices.

Now here’s a quick disclaimer: the actual step by step instructions will also not be laid out because the hardware/firmware is all different. So, it may be best to refer to online manuals of how to get into the administrative pages of these devices and get explanations to the different settings since all the terminology might not be exactly the same.

One other thing to point out: the differences between the manufacturers and their default settings will be vast. Some manufacturers have certain functions/features that will be disabled, opened, etc, by default, while some other vendors may have those same settings enabled or configured for higher restriction by default.

The post End and Not So End Device Security Best Practices appeared first on Hashed Out by The SSL Store™.