Home Networking

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Do I really need pfSense/OPNsense/OpenWRT for my usecase (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm not a power user. I have 4 devices: phone, desktop, laptop and PS5. All these connect to my Archer A6 v2 which also has Pi-Hole as DNS. I tried to tunnel in my pi-hole so that I could block ads and stuff even when I'm off my home network, but because of the risks it comes with, I decided not to use it anymore.

However during my research I did come across DIY router videos which are supposed to be better than most consumer routers. I once had a malware in my work laptop which was trying to order stuff off amazon lol, and since then I'm trying to be careful. I'm also just interested in DIY stuff as a whole, so DIY router sounds fun.

But is it something that I could use tho, does it make sense for my setup? The only risky stuff I do is download pirated games on my desktop and very, very rarely watch corn on the laptop.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Fooling someone into installing malware is far, far more effective than someone trying to penetrate your firewall with a frontal attack, or brute forcing passwords, or faking certificates, man in the middle, or anything "hacking".

Ransomware, one of the proven successful cyber attacks, is pretty much just trying to get a secretary to click on an email attachment that is malevolent. Or faking an ID badge or uniform and just walking into a company and installing ransomware off of a USB drive. Or promising you a new iPhone if you just install this little file to verify you've won. Or pretending to be the IT department and asking someone for their passwords.

Social Engineering has always been magnitudes easier to do than any kind of "using computers to break into other computers" that we normally think of when "hacking" is mentioned.

Installing pirated games is a known and common tactic for getting malware behind your firewall, no direct hacking needed. Just set the bait, and the fish hook themselves.

Just having a basic firewall, which all routers provide, has proven to be enough for home users. Whether it's because no one cares to even hack a home user unless the door is wide open (because he's worthless), or a basic firewall has proven very difficult to bypass through "frontal attack" means, regardless of the reason, home users just aren't being hacked to any significant, measurable degree. If they were, it'd be the central focus of every government and law enforcement agency because of all the money, and political motivation of the outraged people, to make it stop.

Instead, we have almost literally everyone on the planet using the Internet to move / trade large amounts of money every second of every day. There isn't even rumors about anyone we know getting hacked and robbed that way, because Social Media would explode with those kinds of legitimate stories. Unless you are a big or key technology corporation or a government, you simply aren't worth any real skilled hackers time at all, and that's the truth of it.