Book excerpt: A guide to implementing DIY security solutions and readily available technologies to protect home and small-office networks from attack. This book is an easy-to-follow series of tutorials that will lead readers through different facets of protecting household or small-business networks from cyber attacks. You’ll learn how to use pfSense to build a firewall, lock down wireless, segment a network into protected zones, configure a VPN (virtual private network) to hide and encrypt network traffic and communications, set up proxies to speed up network performance and hide the source of traffic, block ads, install and configure an antivirus, back up your data securely, and even how to monitor your network for unauthorized activity and alert you to intrusion.