Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windows.networking.wireless (
More info?)
No. Consumer routers are usually not protected by any anti-virus (etc.)
software and do not offer any anti-virus protection. Their main benefit
comes from their use of NAT, which tends to prevent incoming connections,
which protects against worms. However, in some cases one needs to allow
incoming connections (e.g., file server, video conferences, etc.) and most
routers support something called UPnP, which allows applications to ask a
router to forward incoming connections on particular ports to them. You can
also set this manually so that incoming connections on particular ports are
sent to particular computers on your network. In these cases, the
protection offered by your router is next to none on those ports and you
have to hope that the computers that are receiving the incoming connections
are not susceptible to buffer overflow (etc.) attacks on those ports.
Therefore, when using a router, you will be reasonably well-protected
against worms as long as you do not turn on UPnP or some other kind of port
forwarding. However, some network games and applications need to allow
incoming connections, and so you may need to turn on UPnP for them to
operate properly and hope that they are not vulnerable to attacks on the
ports they are opening. Anti-spam protection may be done by your ISP and by
software on your computer (the best anti-spam protection is to never reply
to spam and to keep your e-mail address off the internet; i.e., change your
e-mail address slightly when posting in newsgroups so that a person can
figure it out but a computer cannot). Anti-virus protection should be done
on your computer because your ISP can scan e-mail attachments but cannot
scan everything sent to your computer over a network. Be sure to update
anti-virus software nightly.
Finally, if you get a wireless router, configure it using a wired
connection, change the default password, and use WPA encryption for wireless
communications.
-Yves
"Scott Needham" <jsn@hwhome.com> wrote in message
news:uKa0AYisFHA.1204@TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...
> Folk:
>
> When networked (cable access, wireless), I understand that the router
> is usually (always?) protected by anti-virus -hack -spam software, so
> do individual 'puters need their own anti-software as well? what is
> the relationship between the software on the router and that on the
> individual 'puters? how do the different installations interact?
> --
>
> Regards and Happy Trails,
>
> Scott Needham
> Boulder, Colorado, USA
>