How to Inspect Network Traffic

A few tips on finding what matters on your home network

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In my cloud security class, I teach students how network architecture can make a difference when trying to spot malicious traffic on your network. The same applies to your home network. You need to weed out the noise to drill down to what your systems are doing and what could be a true threat. You may also just be curious what traffic your systems are sending to vendors and why.

One of the problems people will have on a home network is that it’s difficult to inspect traffic on a WiFi network using most consumer-grade products. They may not provide a firewall, and if they do, you might not be able to get the detail you need. There is also the issue that consumer-grade WiFi products often have security issues themselves.

You can try to get a WiFi device that shows you that traffic. Alternatively, or in addition, you might want to double up with another traffic inspection device outside of that. If you use a firewall between your local network and the Internet that captures all…