| Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) was designed to ease the burden of network managers by allowing the centralized administration of networked nodes. It allows the administrator to remotely gather or alter information on his systems. Hackers, however, can exploit this tool to gather or change information on your systems. A community string is required to use SNMP. The default read string is public, while the default read/write string is private. Most administrators never change this, but if remote network monitoring access is not needed then the string can be changed using the following command to prohibit external SNMP connections to your router: snmp-server community new-comm-string RO