helloo, im 13 yrs old and i am behind a router, my mom said DMZ will put our pc in harm. like taking our information. i understand but would antivirus block us from behing harmed. i was thinkin that using dmz is the same thing as having dial-up connected directly to the phone jack, no router or hub. my question is that is it safe
I don't know if you are playing games online,or what you need DMZ for, but if DMZ is enabled, and you have a firewall up, you don't have a problem. If you want to play an online game, find what ports you need to open, and you can still have the firewall up and not have to drop it and be in DMZ mode.
Your mom is right. By definition, a DMZ is outside the firewall between your internet connection and firewall so whatever is in the DMZ is exposed. Usually a DMZ is used for servers that need to be accessed from the internet. It has limited connections back to your internal network so if the box in the DMZ gets hacked they still don't have access to the rest of your network behind the firewall. With a DMZ, you don't have to open up ports on your firewall to allow traffic though it since the server is outside the firewall. http://compnetworking.about.com/cs/networksecurity/g/bldef_dmz.htm That has a better explanation than I will try to type out of what a DMZ is.
