Question Help? - Keeping Refurb PC's Separated on Home Network

[TheNorthRemembers]

Hello!
I did some digging and I haven't been able to find my exact question so I'm hoping someone can help.

I often help friends and family with their computers when they have issues, download possible viruses, etc. I have also inherited some old laptops I would like to use for tinkering and testing as I go through school. I often get tired of going to their houses and sitting for HOURS in a basement on a hard chair while working on their PCs. I'd like to be able to bring their computers back to my house, plug them in via Ethernet cable to my router and work at my own pace in my own home. My concern is that I don't know the browsing/download habits of these people and I could very well be bringing home an infected laptop.


Is there any advice on how I can plug in these laptops on my home network and still keep all of the other devices on my home network safe if I do have a laptop with active viruses/malware?

Bonus question I just thought of: I have a ton of flash drives with unknown media that I would like go through to see if there is anything of importance. Some have been given to me. How can I safely review a possibly infected USB drive and not have the malware spread through my entire home network?

Thank you all SO MUCH in advance. 😃

 

[kanewolf]

Hello!
I did some digging and I haven't been able to find my exact question so I'm hoping someone can help.

I often help friends and family with their computers when they have issues, download possible viruses, etc. I have also inherited some old laptops I would like to use for tinkering and testing as I go through school. I often get tired of going to their houses and sitting for HOURS in a basement on a hard chair while working on their PCs. I'd like to be able to bring their computers back to my house, plug them in via Ethernet cable to my router and work at my own pace in my own home. My concern is that I don't know the browsing/download habits of these people and I could very well be bringing home an infected laptop.


Is there any advice on how I can plug in these laptops on my home network and still keep all of the other devices on my home network safe if I do have a laptop with active viruses/malware?

Bonus question I just thought of: I have a ton of flash drives with unknown media that I would like go through to see if there is anything of importance. Some have been given to me. How can I safely review a possibly infected USB drive and not have the malware spread through my entire home network?

Thank you all SO MUCH in advance. 😃

What network hardware (models) do you have now?

 

[TheNorthRemembers]

Hi!
Building from scratch. The only hardware I have now is my Verizon G3100 router.

 

[kanewolf]

Hi!
Building from scratch. The only hardware I have now is my Verizon G3100 router.

This article -- https://forums.verizon.com/t5/fios-...ble-for-wired-devices-iot-devices/td-p/913248 says that your G3100 uses a VLAN for guest WIFI. You could take advantage of that and create a VLAN WIRED network as was done in the article. That would isolate the "test bed" traffic from the rest of your network. VLANs can be tricky to implement and I would do thorough testing BEFORE I connected a random PC to the network.
A step up from that security would be a "business" class router that can have multiple DHCP subnets to help further isolate.