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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rodrigo Istalindir" data-source="post: 2848470" data-attributes="member: 2810">Routers are like traffic cops that direct data between different networks (eg your home network and the Internet).NAT is a function on a router that lets PCs inside your network talk to the internet without having a unique IP address.  In the olden days, every device connected to the internet had to have a unique address so that data destined for it could end up at the right place.  As the Internet grew, it became problematic for every device to have a unique IP due to how routers work.  For most desktop PCs (and printers, etc) there was no need for them to have a unique address in most instances since people wouldn't be (or shouldn't be) trying to access them from somewhere else.Enter NAT.  What NAT (Network Address Translation) does is let you assign generic IP addresses (10.x.x.x, 192.168.x.x, 172.16.x.x) to devices on your network, and then the router translates those generic (referred to as 'private') addresses to a unique (known as a 'public') address.  The routers that actually run the Internet are programmed to ignore anything with a private address.So, your PC has a private  IP of 192.168.1.10.  Your router has a public IP of 67.106.168.200 (assigned by your ISP).  When you try to open a web page, the router substitutes your private IP address for its public one, and creates an entry in a table it keeps in its memory.  The web server at Yahoo or wherever sends the data back to the public IP address, and the router reverses the translation by looking in the table it created and sends the data on to the computer at it's private IP.Because the internet routers ignore the private IP addresses, someone can't access your PC directly (in most cases) because all they can know is your public address, and if they dug out the private IP, the internet routers would ignore the request.  Even if they somehow created fake traffic with your public IP address, your router would ignore it because there was no record of you requesting the data in the table it maintains.Most likely, you had to run some program on your PC before the remote tech could connect.  That establishes the initial translation table so that traffic could pass back and forth. NAT is a good defense, but its not foolproof.  It still should be used in conjunction with a decent firewall that actually looks at the traffic that is trying to come in.  Your typical Linksys/Netgear/etc home router has basic firewall capability built in along with NAT/routing functions.</blockquote>

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