Airport Express & LAN

Today I wanna share with you a tip on how to configure the Airport Express to create a NATted network and share the same public IP through all the computers connected to the LAN.

In this way you can have a bit of more security toward the outside computers on the internet.

The creation of a local area network is really easy using the Airport Express, and if you want to use it to connect just a computer to internet through a modem it is straight forward:

• connect the modem to the rear WAN port of the Airport
• connect your RJ45 cable to the Airport switch or go wireless
• turn on the Airport and it will perform all the adjustment to find the internet connection and configure it as a bridge for connecting the computer to the internet.

In this way each computer (configured in DHCP) will have an IP assigned by the router.

To create the NATted network with the Airport Extreme and hide your computers from the outside internet network open the Utility Airport on your Mac or Windows Machine and go to the Internet tab and select “Share a public IP address” from the “Connection sharing” combo like in figure below.

In this way the Airport Express will assign the IPs to the connected computers and outside the network will be seen as a single connected computer, hiding the others.

HTH

Password, safety and Social Engineering for beginners

One of the many ways to protect our information is that of blind with the passwords. These can be of varying complexity and managed by our memory (safest ever, but limited :) in time and in the number of different passwords to remember) or software that allow you to manage, store and / or generate new keys.
Examples of applications are 1Password, KeePass for Mac and Windows or Roboform.

When you surf the web or you are prompted for a password should always pay attention to who is asking us our credentials: it is a trusted site or are about to bite a phishing scam?

Nothing can be safe also using the best cryptex to encrypt our information if we leave our passwords written on post-it or we fall in a phishing site. Social Engineering is well known act aimed to manipulate people and get their information, passwords and so on.

Always check whether you are accessing via HTTPS or via simple HTTP.
In one case the password is transferred from client to server in encrypted manner, so do not be deciphered by any sniffer in the second case (HTTP), the password is transferred in "clear", then a sniffer to read quietly in the information and we are potentially an unsafe condition.

Another IMPORTANT rule is to NOT store anywhere you access codes for your online bank account. Remember that each system is potentially unsafe and can be "hacked" :)

Thanks for reading :-)