nanog mailing list archives
Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing
From: Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>
Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 17:47:28 -0500 (EST)
On Sun, 19 Dec 2004, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
But give him a reasonably sane default package like this and he's a bit more protected against stuff that tries to take over his PC, and the internet has to deal with one trojaned PC less. Drops in the bucket and all that ...
There is a lot of wishful thinking, but security people seem to be very bad about actually testing their theories to see if they are effective. A lot of snake-oil gets sold using the theory it can't hurt. Many Home/SOHO PC's are self-infected by the owners. Network firewalls and anti-virus software are very poor at preventing that. The really scary thing is the infection rate of Home/SOHO computers with AV/firewalls is higher than "naked" computers. What's more interesting is the highest infection rate of all is for homes with laptop/mobile computers. Even when your home broadband modem/gateway has a firewall, when you take your laptop out of the home you lose what little protection you had. Then you bring the infection back inside and infect all your other home computers behind the gateway/firewall. The crunchy outside, soft-chewy inside rule applies to home computers too.
Current thread:
- New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Sean Donelan (Dec 18)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Suresh Ramasubramanian (Dec 18)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Sean Donelan (Dec 18)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Suresh Ramasubramanian (Dec 18)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Jared Mauch (Dec 18)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Sean Donelan (Dec 19)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Suresh Ramasubramanian (Dec 19)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine (Dec 19)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Sean Donelan (Dec 19)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Barney Wolff (Dec 19)
- Message not available
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Barney Wolff (Dec 19)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Suresh Ramasubramanian (Dec 19)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Sean Donelan (Dec 18)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Suresh Ramasubramanian (Dec 18)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Suresh Ramasubramanian (Dec 19)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Sean Donelan (Dec 19)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Richard Irving (Dec 19)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Petri Helenius (Dec 19)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing David Vincent (Dec 19)
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Jerry Pasker (Dec 19)
- Message not available
- Re: New Computer? Six Steps to Safer Surfing Suresh Ramasubramanian (Dec 19)