The Cost of Computer Naivete

wiredog writes "What happens when you put an unprotected Windows 98 box on a broadband connection? Two perspectives from two reporters for the Washington Post (frr,yyy): The User's " an odyssey that has taken $800 and roughly 48 man-hours over nearly three weeks" and Digital Doctor's "Her PC was in such bad shape, it required 10 1/2 hours of surgery to restore it to working condition.""

Comments

Windows 98? What about XP?

[Brain Stew]

It is bad enough with 98, but what if the same experiment where conducted with XP, considering all the wild RPC attacks?

This reminds me..

[manavendra]

..of my initial days of tinkering around with RedHat 6.x.

My old office had two RH boxes on a static IP. There was no such thing as an administrator. As a programmer, I was supposed to install all applications, configure them and also *ensure* it was up and running.

Got a call from the ISP two days later. They had shut down the machine because of complaints from other users - apparently some application from these machines were flooding the network (I never did find out what they were doing though). Got the ISP to restart them. Frantic googling and few "security guide" downloads later, I started exploring what was wrong with them (incidentally, I was *still* accessing those machines remotely - my office wouldn't pay for me to go to the site to check the machines). Turned out there were THREE rootkits installed on one of thsoe machines. Found the traces of one of the possible three attackers - was some IP space in netherlands. Later found that that range of IP addresses was actually under contention and was thought to be not allocated and probably belonged to some malicious/rogue ISPs (I haven't understood this part yet).

Not knowing much, I got them to reinstall the OS. Of the three, two rootkits appeared within 2 days. Another re-install, this time with the Linux security guide implementations for securing the box. Things were ok for about 2 weeks or so. I then had yet another attack and someone was using my box as a IRC relay host (or something) and I was still in trouble.

Finally, after some RH updates and more tweaks (and ipchains and iptables install/config), I was able to have reasonably secure machines.

Trial by fire, but I learnt a lot!

*shiver. I hate to think how it would have been, had those been '98 machines

Re:Whose fault is it? The ISP.

[Rick Genter]

I maintain computers for a set of Curves for Women gyms owned by a couple of friends of mine. I run into the spyware/malware problem all the time.

Each gym uses DSL to connect to the internet. While working on one of the computers this weekend, I noticed that McAfee Personal Firewall (I stopped using Norton a while ago) wasn't seeing any inbound events, unlike the other gyms where it sees 10,000 to 20,000 events per week. A little investigation showed that the DSL modem at this site has a built-in DHCP server/router/firewall/NAT function. Seems like the DSL providers are getting a clue and building necessary capabilities into the hardware that the customer has to have just to connect to the Internet.