Okay, here’s my blog post about dealing with “gray zone invaders from afar,” written in a casual, personal style:
So, I’ve been messing around with network security lately, and let me tell you, it’s a wild world out there. I wanted to see what kind of unwanted traffic was hitting my home network, specifically stuff that wasn’t obviously malicious, but still kinda sketchy – you know, the “gray zone” stuff.
First thing I did was fire up my trusty old router. I mean, it’s nothing fancy, just a standard consumer-grade thing, but it has some basic logging capabilities. I dug around in the settings until I found the logs, and… wow. Lots of stuff.
Mostly, it was just normal traffic – my phone checking for updates, my laptop streaming cat videos, you get the idea. But then I started noticing some weird connections from IP addresses I didn’t recognize, located in countries I’ve never even been to. Not a ton, but enough to make me go “hmm.”
Diving Deeper
I grabbed one of those IP addresses and popped it into an online lookup tool. Turns out, it was associated with a hosting provider known for, shall we say, “less than reputable” activities. Okay, red flag number one.
Next, I set up a simple network monitoring tool on an old Raspberry Pi I had lying around. I’m not gonna lie, it took some fiddling to get it working right. I’m no expert, just a curious dude with some time on his hands.
After letting it run for a few days, that monitoring tool started showing me some interesting patterns. These “gray zone” connections weren’t just random pings. They were trying to access specific ports on my network, ports that shouldn’t have been open to the outside world.
- Port scanning. They were definitely looking to see what was open.
- Attempted connections. They were not successful thankfully.
Locking It Down
Okay, time to tighten things up. I went back into my router settings and double-checked my firewall rules. Turns out, I had a couple of ports open that I didn’t need. Oops. Closed those down immediately.
I also enabled some more advanced security features on my router, like intrusion detection. Again, I’m not sure how effective these are on a consumer-grade router, but hey, every little bit helps, right?
The result? The “gray zone” traffic hasn’t disappeared completely, but it’s definitely decreased. And more importantly, I feel a lot better knowing that I’ve taken some basic steps to protect my network from these “invaders from afar.”
It’s a constant learning experience, and I still don’t know if those connections has bad purpose, but at least I made my place safer.
