When it comes to securing your computer, the first thing you probably think about is protecting against hackers, viruses, and spyware. Just as important in today’s networking environment is securing shared resources such as folders and files.

Smaller networks typically use peer-to-peer networking rather than centralized file servers. Peer-to-peer networks present added challenges when it comes to providing security.

What many companies fail to understand is that most security breaches don’t occur because of hackers breaking into their networks, computers, and servers. Rather, most security breaches occur because company users get too nosey about what’s on other computers in the organization.

In the old days, sharing resources on Windows 9x/Me systems is as easy as opening Network Neighborhood and double-clicking the share name, and maybe typing a password if the resource is password protected. However, the process became a bit more complicated in Windows XP and now in Vista because of the newer operating systems’ increased focus on security.

Within any Windows network environment (peer-to peer or server-based), you can set sharing permissions for drives and folders. By default, when you set up a PC on a network, no drives or folders on that PC are shared. The local user of that PC can choose to share entire drives or individual folders on a drive. However, this type of security is not that secure because it affects only network access. Local access (that is, someone physically sitting down at the PC and logging on) is wide open.

For drives formatted with NTFS, you can set NTFS permissions. These can affect drives and folders as well individual files. NTFS permissions affect local users as well as network users and are based on the permission granted to individual user logons, regardless of where they are connecting. You also have a much wider variety of permissions to choose from with NTFS permissions, so you can more precisely control the rights being granted.

When sharing permissions and NTFS permissions conflict, the most restrictive of the two wins. For example, if someone has full access to a certain file from NTFS permissions but has no sharing permissions to the folder in which it resides, he or she cannot access the file from the network. However, the individual can physically sit down at the local PC containing the file, log in, and access it, because sharing permissions do not affect local access.