Molded Keytops (slightly OT again)

[Greg Newell]

Jim,
         Well, you can easily pick up viruses off of email. We all know 
that. The danger that I am concerned about is the bots that go looking for 
active IP addresses when one is online. Even if you are not actively 
downloading these bots can detect your presence and use your computer 
against you or others in the form of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks. 
These small programs are placed on your hard drive without your knowledge 
and then called upon when you are online to spike others addresses or to 
effectively keep you connection so busy as to render your online experience 
useless. The only way I know of to stop these things is with a firewall. A 
firewall is like a one way mirror to the internet. You can see out but they 
can't see in. If the Firewall is doing it's job it cannot even be detected 
that you are online or that there is anything at all at the end of the IP 
address that they are scanning. If you are unlucky enough to have one of 
these small programs on your hard drive that are called upon to participate 
in Distributed Denial of Service Attacks the working Firewall renders them 
dead because the computer that put the file on your hard drive can no 
longer contact your computer to put the program into effect. It's a little 
late and I hope I wrote that so it makes some sense to you all. For the 
best description please do visit grc.com and first scan all your Shields 
and ports and such and then read up on the firewall (zonealarm is really 
the best and it's free and it doesn't take up much space, .... 
zonealarm.com) and distributed Denial of Service Attacks at 
http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm .       For the Win XP issues see the same 
site in the last sentence. The issue is that Microsoft is thought to have 
designed XP with too many things left wide open by default. You can and 
should take steps to close XP down to outside attacks. To the grammar 
police I apologize in advance for the never ending and rambling paragraph. 
Some say this is not worth worrying about but the identity thing is no joke 
and getting more common all the time. One thing I forgot to mention is that 
if your IP address is marked as active and you are lucky enough to not have 
one of these nasty little programs on your hard drive, and even if you 
never get them, these scanner know your there and can come back at any time 
to scan for more info about you any time they choose. Am I being a worry 
wart? You decide.

Greg Newell



At 08:58 PM 6/22/2002, you wrote:

>In a message dated 22/06/02 8:54:10 PM, gnewell@ameritech.net writes:
>
><< There's also quite a bit of talk about Internet security issues.  >>
>
>Greg, appreciate the concern here. I don't plan on using this thingee on the
>net...strictly for e.mail away from home and for some serious type
>writing....... No downloading of 'anything' from 'anybody'.......... still a
>potential problem??
>Jim Bryant (FL)

Greg Newell
mailto:gnewell@ameritech.net