Secure Your Home Network: Introduction

This is the beginning of a new series about what (mostly) non-technical readers can do to lock down their home networks to a decent level of security.  I need to start with some caveats here:

1. It's pretty easy to protect yourself from "script kiddies" (Bad Guys who just use canned exploits without knowing much (or anything) about you or your home network.  Hopefully the posts in this series will make you, if not impervious to, at least unreasonably difficult for these attackers.
2. It's harder to protect yourself from a knowledgeable and determined attacker.  Someone with skill, time, and motivation to attack you is a dangerous opponent.  Hopefully the posts in this series will increase the required time, skill, and motivation needed for these Bad Guys to succeed.  Basically, it raises the cost for them to attack you which is A Good Thing.
3. At the end of the day, you can't protect yourself from NSA or FSB (the KGB successor organization).  Or the Chinese, who are quite active and skilled.  Even keeping them from sniffing out your traffic is really, really hard.  If you think that any of these organizations are likely to want to access your computers, then you should unplug from the 'Net right now.  Not kidding.  

So if you're interested in this kind of thing, and are willing to spend a nominal amount of time and money to raise the bar on your home network security, follow along on this series of posts.

Tomorrow's post: What is a Firewall and why do you care?