There’s a very informative series of podcasts coming from Steve Gibson (best known to those of us who lived through DOS as the creator of SpinRite–a hard disk utility) and Leo Laporte that I’d like to recommend. Currently at episode 26 or so, the series has been devoted to current topics in computer security but in the past few weeks Steve has backed up a bit and done a couple of in-depth tutorials on how the internet actually works–basic stuff like IP addresses, routers, UDP and TCP protocols, packet construction, what “ports†actually are, and so on. This is just the sort of information that you need to better understand computer security (as opposed to say an encyclopedic knowledge of various virus names) and helps you evaluate the threats you’re exposed to.
As you might expect, the primary focus tends to be on Windows but there is information that applies across all platforms. The site supporting the podcast (with transcripts, show notes, links, etc) is found at: