chris1 said:
When I go to port forwarding in my Netgear Router their is a drop down list under service name in their is the following names:
Age-of - empire
ip-phone
net meeting
news
quake11/111
Real Audio
The thing about this is that I have never used any of these products so How have they got their in fact it's the first time I've looked into the router settings.
They are just standard ports that people tend to want to forward and are preconfigured for ease of use. Nothing to worry about.
These settings are built in to a lot of ADSL/DSL routers. They are there to simplify port forwarding for numptys, eg if you wanted to forward a port to your webserver or a video game server (e.g. Age of Empires), its all pre-set for you.
Flavours of WPA encryption are better than WEP, but both can now be hacked.
The truth is that most of the kind of people who would be inclined to try to piggy back on your wifi connection are too dumb/lazy to figure out how to do it. (Unless its been left wide open). I've heard lots of people claiming that they hacked this wifi network or that, but it all turns out to be bull. If they bothered to actually research it, they'd find it was possible. But that would require a little work
I even overheard one person say that he was wirelessly picking up a broadband connection from the underground cable that passed by his front door..
Any reputable bank will be using SSL (HTTPS) meaning that when you send your authentication credentials to a site, they are encrypted. So I wouldn't worry too much about it. (Unless someone installed a keylogger on your system

)