Would you go out to the movies and leave your front door open? Of couse not so why do people leave their network wide open for hackers to walk in and steal your sensitive information and your job while they are at it.

Before you get into sophiticated areas such as VPN and intrusion detection you need to take afew simple steps to lock down your router. The fundamentals include protecting your console and aux ports and then writing an access list to decide on who can come in and out of your network.

Access lists and passwords are the bread and butter for every Cisco network engineer.