adikgede Posted September 3, 2003 Report Share Posted September 3, 2003 Well I agree the average Joe is just not very attractive to a cracker, If I were such a person I would be more interested in big iron not hundreds of thousands of Presarios. Having said that The average Joe is however vulnerable to broad based attacks that either attempt to damage Joes computer or use Joes computer to mount a an attack on another computer. Virus like this come in through e-mail more often than not so a firewall won't be a big help unless you close the mail ports down, and resign youself to webmail or train yourself not to take attachements from strangers or trust that your friends are virus free. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALHOLK Posted September 3, 2003 Report Share Posted September 3, 2003 Hi! Read? Instructions??? Is that like a man u al? This is the number one rule for us computer professionals. When everything else fails, Read The Fucking Manual. regards ALHOLK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALHOLK Posted September 3, 2003 Report Share Posted September 3, 2003 Hi! I don't know if it has ever been done with a virus but at least older monitors could be destroyed buy screwing up the timing. I have also heard of hard disks that will be useless after a low level format. I don't know if this is true though. regards ALHOLK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BritTim Posted September 3, 2003 Report Share Posted September 3, 2003 ...not only erase the complete contents of the harddrive, but even cause certain kinds of physical damage to some machines. Is this somethng you know for certain? While it is possible to have software that damages hardware I don't recall a virus that has done this. Has it happened? Sort of. The most famous example was the Chernobyl virus that, besides erasing the contents of the harddrive, would wipe the system BIOS on vulnerable machines. Effectively, this required replacement of the BIOS chip. Some advanced hackers are aware of a range of techniques for damaging hardware. None will work on all machines. It is entirely possible to embed such technques in computer worms. I hope we continue to enjoy the luck we have had to date. Recognise, however, that the risks I describe are very real. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BritTim Posted September 3, 2003 Report Share Posted September 3, 2003 would prefer a hardware solution that doesn't break the bank A simple router, of the kind suggested by adikgede, is easy to setup, very cheap, and is certainly much better than nothing. If you have a friendly geek to help, the next step up is a combined router/firewall. Some of these have good documentation and are actually not that hard to configure. These combined devices start at about US$150 and go up from there (sometimes way up!) For your purposes, a low end (but well documented) solution would be appropriate. The more expensive devices are designed for high throughput/high availability environments rather than simple protection. The same level of protection (even slightly better) can be achieved with the PC based router/firewalls discussed in earlier posts by (particularly) adikgede and myself. The direct costs are less: about US$60 in second hand hardware and the software is free. This is not suitable for a casual user, however. Unless you know a network specialist who does stuff like this for fun, you are better off buying a hardware router or router/firewall. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted September 3, 2003 Report Share Posted September 3, 2003 Thanks Brit Tim. The investigation continues. My onl current hesitation is the fact that the tech from the phone co that installed this spent 6 hours and 3 different routers before he could get it configured. So i need to find a friendly geek before attempting any changes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
legover Posted September 3, 2003 Author Report Share Posted September 3, 2003 **Uh... sorry but I don't quite follow the post. Are you saying that Zonealarm alone is effective or that it isn't and you need to run BlackIce as well?** Zonealarm is ONLY effective, at best, in preventing certain kinds of unauthorized access to your machine from sites other than those you allow. ie if you tell Zonealarm any given site is OK to connect to, ANY data/exe files can now be downloaded through port 80 onto your machine, & any files/data, configuration settings files, the registry etc can be uploaded. Zonealarm does not discriminate the type of data stream once given access permission to that site/machine. In theory Blackice (a network intrusion device rather than a firewall) should prevent a hack/crack even when Zonealarm fails, by analysing packets, leading to speculation the hack was carried out by someone who knew more about my machine than should ever be prudent as BlackIce was crippled in the process too. It is not prudent to let others know what kind of locks you have on your house or your computer. XP Pro, the installed OS, is a strain of Chicago (Win NT2000) with a host of built-in communications services which pass data to Microsoft & others, for example, from Word, Messenger [not to be confused with Windows Messenger] along with a dozen other services on your machine. All C$, D$ drives etc IPC$ are permanently shared by default (you can disable sharing only for the session for what that's worth. When you reboot they reconfigure as shared drives). I've yet to discover why COM3 had been nuked & remapped to COM5 by the installer. Auto-redial had been checked to ON which initiated several auto re-dials over a period of days whenever the Internet connection was broken. The installer ernestly advised not to install BlackIce (another stage of difficulty for a hacker), or to install a hardware firewall. Even here plenty of research is required as there are many known backdoors for many hardware firewalls. Manufactureres lie. I can't see Microsoft & the like protecting their systems with free/low-cost software firewalls. More like black boxes of some type, not necessarily too expensive. I understand XP can be configured by a Domain Administrator to broadcast a machine's IP address to his machine every time you connect to the network, ie the Internet, putting an icon on a Domain Controller's screen. From this point he has access to your shared drives & all folders & files, your registry, your Recent Documents lists (many instances spread across your directories, (in my case one was well hidden & UNSEARCHABLE though the search engine though you can find them listed in the registry under their appropriate key) remote access in fact to any service, program, data file, registry setting or configuration setting you have. In this case, even if you configured certain services to be disabled like Telnet or Remote Registry Access, or Log on as a Batch Job, (find this list through Computer Management in Admin Tools then Services or type compmgmt.msc in the Run box) he can VERY EASILY reconfigure them through prepared templates almost without effort. All of which i would never have learned hadn't noticed one small Backup file whose owner (check File\ Properties\Security) was neither Administrator, Administrators, me nor any other User(every file in your directories has an OWNER). There were severals other oddities too. PS if you go to Help in your OS you'll find some stuff about communicating data over a network by phone line, without a modem, (& dial-up & call-back and other interesting stuff, most of which most installers claim they have no knowledge of, even deny exists. All good stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted September 3, 2003 Report Share Posted September 3, 2003 Small nit: "Chicago" was the internal Microsoft codename for Windows 95, not NT or 2000. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BritTim Posted September 4, 2003 Report Share Posted September 4, 2003 "Chicago" was the internal Microsoft codename for Windows 95, not NT or 2000. Correct. But the name lives on as a keyword in certain areas of later versions of Windows (sensibly enough, MS never wasted the resources needed to rename this stuff). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted September 4, 2003 Report Share Posted September 4, 2003 It's a keyword in device inf files because NT necessarily adopted the Win9x inf model for plug and play support. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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