Public Wi-Fi is a lifesaver if you're trying to save on data usage or you need the Internet access, but sometimes the consequences of using public Wi-Fi can outweigh its convenience. Whether you're in a coffee shop, public library, university or an airport, all free Wi-Fi hotspots are equally susceptible to hackers and other data thieves. To mitigate these risks, users must take preventative measures to ensure that they are using public Wi-Fi safely.

The private IP addresses are the reserved IP address blocks that cannot be routed through the internet. Since private IP addresses are only intended to be used in private networks, they are not globally unique. The private IP address must be unique within its network (usually LAN) so that there is no conflict between two computers within its network. Due to scarce nature of IPv4 Address (i.e. approximately 4 billion IP addresses), IANA reserved private IP address blocks so that they can be used by any organization without registering them with IANA. The private IP address block can be used in homes, small businesses, or even medium and large enterprises to create their own network. Computing devices with a private IP address cannot be directly accessed from the Internet unless NAT (Network Address Translation) is used. The advanced network planning techniques have also enabled network planners to use same private IP address within different private networks thus allowing them to save valuable IP address space. A private address may also be referred to as a local IP address. It also enables to hide the identity of the users over the Internet.

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a protocol at the application layer of the Internet Protocol (IP) Suite. The protocol is used for distributed, collaborative, and hypermedia information systems which put it at the core of data communication across the World Wide Web (WWW). This means that when a user goes to a (distributed or collaborative information systems) website or loads any form of interactive media (hypermedia information systems), it is this protocol which transfers the information back and forth. Hypertext is structured text which has the feature of logical links (hyperlinks) between endpoints. This means that HTTP is literally the protocol to handle the transfer of hypertext.

IP ban is a block set up by a server to reject the request made from a particular IP or range of IP addresses. The IP ban may have been implemented automatically due to an abuse pattern detected by the server or placed manually by an administrator. IP ban is implemented to protect the server from abuse such as brute force attacks, block emails from known spammers, and limit usage by users.

One of our sister website hosted on cloud server was recently hit by a 9Mbps DDoS, and the apache web server ran out of memory and crashed. The attack lasted more than 2-months with no known reason. We've taken a number of mitigation steps including installation of mod_security with mod_evasive, APF, BFD, DDoS Deflate and Rootkit and Traffic Control, but none came to rescue. Use of Linux provided WAF will mitigate the DDoS to the extent where CPU, Memory and Bandwidth are allowed; and in our case a single CentOS server with 4GB RAM wasn't sufficient to mitigate DDoS.

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a protocol used in the Internet Protocol (IP) Suite used for the transferring of files across a network between a server and a client. The protocol was built from the ground up with the client-server model in mind and utilizes different connections for data and control between the two. Users can authenticate themselves with a clear-text sign-in protocol which is usually in the form of a username and password or they can connect to the server anonymously if it is configured to allow it. Transmissions of a user's login credentials can be secured by Transport Layer Security / Secure Sockets Layer (TLS/SSL); which can also encrypt the content of transmissions. Should this not be the case, the information is transmitted unencrypted which leaves it susceptible to a sniffing attack. In some scenarios, SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) might be used but it should be noted that the protocol is technologically different than TLS/SSL.

Users receive multiple emails on a daily basis, some work-related, some personal and others from unknown sources. Sometimes it can be difficult to know which of these emails are legitimate and which aren't. Have you ever received an email from the government requesting your Social Security Number, a payment company stating your card was declined, or a website that claimed you were a contest winner? If you've ever doubted the authenticity of these emails, you can track their source location. These types of emails are ones in which you should trace the source to find your answer. Tracing the source of an email can be very useful, especially for verification purposes. In this blog, we'll show you how.

The two types of internet protocol are IPv4 and IPv6. In this article, we are going to look at the difference between the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is used to securely connect to another network via a public or a private network. A VPN creates a private network within a broader network, thus providing added-security using encryption and network tunneling mechanisms. A VPN is like a bridge that connects two islands (here, LANs) to establish an private, secure and more reliable connection between the two islands (here, local networks). This helps ease security and privacy issues; since the data transmitted over a VPN is encrypted and unreadable to general Internet community. There are two types of VPNs, namely remote-access VPN and site-to-site VPN.

The main purpose of using both proxies and VPN services is to hide the IP Address of the users or to prevent tracking bodies and individuals from identifying their location. For example, this may even be used to access certain sites that are not otherwise accessible in the user's country. A lot of VPN providers also provide proxy services apart from providing VPN services. You can also use many public proxy servers at little to no charge.