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Is Obsolescence Good Computer Security?
caesar-auf-nihil asks: "I was recently considering a switch from dial-up to something faster (either cable or DSL) but my friend recommended against it since he said I was more secure staying with Dial-Up. His argument was that my connection's slowness and 'not always on' connection gave me better security since I was less of a target for many security threats. Now, I have never gotten infected, nor do I believe my machine is infested with spyware and/or controlling programs as it runs fine, but I wonder if the obsolescence argument is really good or not. Does Dial-Up really protect you or is this a false sense of security and I should just go ahead and pick a faster service and make sure my firewall is a good one and my virus definitions are always up to date?"
Its only true in the way that you will be mugged less if you walk naked down one back alley every night instead of twenty. Go ahead and get the faster connection, and get a hardware device (nat box at least, a real firewall would be better though) between you and your uplink line, and you'll be better off than you were before. You can't do that (using common hardware) with your modem in the first place.
Not to mention you can't exactly throw a Linksys router (hardware firewall) inbetween you and the wall when you are on dialup.
Perhaps you've never seen one of these.
We used to sell them to customers too far out in the sticks to get anything but dialup but whom wanted extra security or the ability to network multiple machines. We even had an entire office once that did all of their billing to an AS/400 via a dialup. It was all terminal based so the dialup worked just fine. At peak hours they had 11 people all doing billing at the same time. And you know what's really sad? They could do it faster on that terminal system then any GUI that has come since.
Ditto when I worked in the insurance field. We absoletely hated the new version of our agency management system when they moved to Windows. When will interface designers learn that it's faster if you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard every three seconds?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
In a home environment, this is likely not a real problem. In a business environment, anything beyond about 15 active users is usually too much for a Linksys-type router, since the processor and memory capabilities of these are usually pretty low. I think Netgear has a few for small/medium businesses, but if all you want is a NAT box, Linux/*BSD work quite well on some pretty low-end hardware. 100 users on a DSL/Cable circuit could be handled by an old Pentium 133 picked up on eBay for $25. At work, we have a FreeBSD box (though on a much faster Opteron 244) doing NAT, firewalling, monitoring, load balancing, and intrusion detection for 2 Gigabit segments, 3 T1s, and a Frame Relay circuit. On average, this box is at 0.4% CPU utilization when you aren't actively monitoring something.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.