Hi Elaine,
Just to be clear on the fix, moving from shared IP addressing to dedicated IP
addressing does very little to improve the security of your own
computers/Internet enabled devices. What it does do is prevent one user’s poor
Internet “hygiene” from causing problems for other users of Warwick Broadband.
Consider IP addresses to be regular old street addresses. Shared IP addressing
is like an apartment building with a single street address but with multiple
apartments in it. You address an apartment directly using a two-line address
such as:
123 Main St.
Apt. 2
Now some apartment buildings give each apartment its own street address
(dedicated IP addressing) and you can address those apartments with a single
line address:
123-2 Main St.
Now let’s say you’re getting spam from apartment 2 and you want to block it,
but you can only block it based on the first line of the address. With the
first address scheme (Shared IP addressing) you have to block the entire
apartment building (123 Main St.). With the second address scheme (Dedicated
IP addressing) you can block the specific apartment (123-2 Main St.).
WBS currently maps all of us to only a few shared IP addresses. So when one
user does something “bad” (like opening a unknown link and inadvertently
infecting their computer with a malware email bot) all the users that are
sharing that IP address are “punished”. Punishment being that their (shared) IP
address is put on one or more of the 80 plus spam blacklist databases. IP
addresses that appear on these lists are regularly blocked from all sorts of
internet access (email, web sites, etc.).
By moving to dedicated IP addresses, each user will be isolated from the rest,
so “bad” behavior by one will not impact anyone else (and the user actually
having the problem will be easier to identify). But you still need to practice
good Internet hygiene yourself else you will be subject to all sorts of
Internet security horrors, independent of what your neighbors are doing.
By the way, if you want to check and see if your (shared) IP address is on any
of the more popular blacklists you can go to
https://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check ;
<https://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check>
to check. Different email servers and websites use different blacklists, so
appearing on one or more of these lists may or may not impact your Internet
experience.
Tim
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