Questions for the IT crowd

Hackerspace Information Security
#1

Well, we’ve arrived in Brisbane and things are awesome here. Winter weather is sunny and 75 right now with a slight sea breeze keeping the air moving. Overall, not terrible.

BUT… there are some things that I’m working through, one of which being stupid slow internet and the fact that I can’t get anything other than Australian Netflix here on the Roku… and it’s pretty bad!

I knew that would be a problem, and have been looking at VPN’s and such, but I’m afraid that the low bandwidth will still be a problem. But that’s not the current problem I’m concerned with. What I’m trying to figure out is whether I can set up one network that’s routed through the VPN, and another that’s just the local network. The internet here comes in to a combined cable modem / wifi router and actually has 2 ethernet ports as well.

I’m hoping that I can plug a second wifi router via the ethernet ports and set the second router up with VPN. I signed up for a VPN before leaving, but not sure it was the best option out there; didn’t have much time to research this.

So a few questions:

  • Am I way off base thinking this should work?
  • Does anyone have a preferred VPN service they like?
  • What else should I be thinking about that I may be missing since this is definitely not my area of expertise?
#2

This is a double NAT setup, and isn’t terribly uncommon. That said, there may be a handful of quirks to watch out for, such as uPnP will probably not work as expected.
(uPnP is a service for automatically forwarding ports. I’d guess that your VPN router expects to be connected directly to the internet, and not ask an upstream router for a port regardless.)

What you would want to do is go into the settings of the primary router, and place the VPN router into “DMZ” mode. This essentially disables all firewall protection for the device. That shouldn’t be a problem, the VPN router should have its own firewall.

#3

For generic web browsing, pihole will give you a decent speed boost. It’s a dns based ad block and keeps you from downloading ads.

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#4

just dumps the packets based on blacklist, right?

#5

Does anyone have a preferred VPN service they like?

https://www.newshosting.com/vpn/ or https://aws.amazon.com/vpn/

Am I way off base thinking this should work?

VPN between routers only secures between routers. When one is on the a router, internet, and a vpn they have three networks 2 private, one public and a termination point external of the “home” router.

If one is just trying to get an IP address from one country while in another then that’s where a SOCKS5 VPN and VPN works best. In this use case newshosting.com is best since they 1) provide alt.binary.* usenet access and 2) worldwide vpn hosts.

I personally use them to jump from aws in china to amsterdam then London just to watch BBC 1 and sky news directly.

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#6

Its actually a part of a UTM (Unified threat management) strategy. PI-Hole has a filtering proxy. Plus pulls from several RBL’s (remote blacklists) and security lists:

Makes for a great addition to threatstop and uMatrix to stop threats at the edge before they hit your firewall or pc.

Throw in Hotspotsystems, clam-av, snort, and google for email scanning then one has nearly enterprise level security for the price of a raspberry pi 3+

#7

There are quite a few VPNs that are blocked by Netflix. You are going to have to find one that works.

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#8

Pihole is a DNS based blacklist. Rather than dumping the packets like they would with a firewall (consuming bandwidth) it blacklists the DNS resolution based on a url blacklist keeping any traffic from being requested. It’s also network wide and works for mobile, all browsers and devices, if you set up your router to use the pihole as your DNS server that is.

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