Terrorism and Internet Security

There are two kind of terrorists from my oppinion the ones who kill peoples and the ones who destroys computer networks governmental and private ones.
You are not safe in your house anymore any crazy burglar can get in and killing you because you stay in his way and your computer can be destroyd by a hacker or by a virus in any moment.
Where can we be safe?
Is any place there?!
Personal web-site with some usefull links http://www.bani.home.ro is in english.

Personally I use Zone Alarm as a Firewall so far it was worked wonders for me

Personally, I keep all my important stuff on my Linux boxes (that are on a private LAN)

I don't install spyware infested crap, I've not ran a firewall on a Windows machine in 11 years on the net, and never had a windows machine of mine get hacked

I used Linux once, I didnt like it becasue it didnt regonise any of my Laptop drivers.

Sound Drivers
Display Drivers
Modem Drivers
Only Drive C: was found and not my D: or E:

So ill Stick with a protected WORKING computer for the time being

Well, you can't expect the latest hardware to work with Linux from Day 1. Micro$oft gets this hardware months in advance, and the hardware developers themselves write the Windows drivers..

What you should do is complain to the hardware manufacturers they THEY don't support Linux - not that Linux doesn't support their hardware

thats true. $$$

Personally, I don't keep anything on my computer worth stealing. Go ahead, hack my computer. Steal my source code! Woah! Shaking in my boots!

Viruses are NOT scary. They are a way of life. Granted, they were created by someone with ill intent. Basically, they're a definite. Your computer will get a virus one of these days, it'll probably crash once or twice in the future, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Backup your important stuff frequently or keep it all on an external drive and even if your computer goes haywire you're still safe.

There is nothing safe, and if you find one, soon will be easy to crack down.

best way is to backup your files from time to time(and save them into external device).

somehow i doubt it. You don't need to run spyware to get hacked

I used to use zonealarm but one day I realized my computer was running real slow, I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and brought up the processes list, and saw that vsmon.exe was using 112MB of RAM (that PC has 128MB). You know what vsmon.exe is? Zonealarm!

So I got sygate personal firewall, its better. It has much better protection against various methods of getting data in and out.

although i used zonealarm for so long, but i never realized that.

You know, people don't break home systems to steal your information.
They break them to use them; their HD space, their bandwidth.
In a windows environment, it is perfectly simple to create hidden files -- not the way in which most Windows users think, (i.e. hiding file types, or hidden shares) but using a bug introduced into windows in order to make it more compatible with Mac's. You can effectively hide as much data on a system as you like, and the system will always report the proper amount of free space -- sans hidden files. The latest version of Tripwire addresses this issue.
As for the latter, lets just say if I were a nefarious hacker, (cough cough) and I wanted to whack some site, chances are that site is on a wide pipe. My little DSL/Cable connection to the Internet is not gonna help me DDOS that pipe, much less the systems utilized. What I need is a chain of unprotected home users, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands strong which when aggregated *will* be the proper amount of thrust.
With the Patriot Act firmly ensconced, you do realize that technically and unprotected network used to cause fiduciary damage can be held libel? It's not very likely that when Amazon gets whacked they will come after the little guy... or is it?

I am sure many of you experience the same familial problems as I; being "computer people" our families regard us as the 'go to' folks when friends, relatives, pets, etc. et al have computer problems. Often we get lent out -- often while we are supposed to be enjoying a relaxing vacation -- to "repair" deficiencies with said systems.

I have learned to bring my forensic tool box along, as more often than not I have found unprotected windows systems on broadband connections compromised and in some cases heavily utilized. All without the knowledge of the owners.

In can happen, and it does. Food for thought.

Cheers.

stange, vsmon.exe is using 6,148 K on my machine, 6 mb is hardly what I would call a memory drain

look, I have no idea why it was doing it, but I can promise you, it was doing it. I will not rule out the possibility that I got some piece of malware and that was using up all that RAM, but when I exited zonealarm, it went away. I went on the net and downloaded sygate and never looked back.

The thing I absolutely love about sygate (and hated with zonealarm) is its alert messages. They pop up right in front of you, in the center of the screen, where you WILL see them, rather than in the bottom right. But that isn't too important. It's what they don't do. Sygate's windows DON'T take the focus when they appear. They appear right in front of everything, but don't take the focus. This means if you're, say, typing an email and an alert comes up and takes the focus, you don't always notice imeediately that an alert has appeared. And so you type your email into the alert box. Eventually you are going to press either "y" or "n" or one of the other shortcut keys on the box and it it going to think you clicked Y or N, and you have no idea what program you just let onto the internet, or worse, who you just let in. With sygate this is a non-issue. An alert pops up but you can keep on typing and the text will go where it belongs.

There are heaps of other things I love about sygate, but I'm tired and don't particularly want to list them all here.

For security I use Zone Alarm too, along with Norton Antivirus, SpyBot, and Ad-Aware. Seems to work fine.

I keep my work and other important files on an external hard drive, and only plug it in when I am not connected to the Net. I can always reformat my internal hard drive in case of trouble.

So far, no problems [fingers crossed].