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US Government Checking Up On Vista Users?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the security-theatre-in-your-home dept.

Paris The Pirate writes "This article at Whitedust displays some very interesting logs from Vista showing connections to the DoD Information Networking Center, United Nations Development program and the Halliburton Company; for no reason other than the machine was running Vista. From the article 'After running Vista for only a few days — with a complete love for the new platform the first sign of trouble erupted. I began noticing latency on my home network connection — so I booted my port sniffing software and networking tools to see what was happening. What I found was foundation shaking. The two images below show graphical depictions of what has and IS trying to connect to my computer even in an idle state'."

4 of 291 comments (clear)

  1. Just Vista? by orkysoft · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So he installed Vista, plus his warez, and now he's seeing suspicious network connections? Get a grip.

    I'd like to see a bare install of Vista (legit), with no other programs running, and connection monitoring being done on a router in between the Vista box and the internet, before I will believe this. And I say this as a die-hard Linux user who has barely touched XP.

    --

    I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
  2. You call that a conspiracy? by Nate+Eldredge · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Okay, so maybe the US government and Halliburton are checking up on Vista users, but that's benign compared to the folks after us FreeBSD users. I whois'ed some of my port scan logs and found McGraw Hill, The Washington Post, the BBC, and Ikea. Now that is one terrifying conspiracy. Eisenhower was right when he warned us of the dangers of the media-Swedish furniture complex.

    Seriously, though. Worms and botnets are endemic and every organization has boxes probing the internet without their knowledge. Doesn't mean they're out to get you.

    I always hated people who would whine about Slashdot story selection, but come on, editors, use a little discretion. You're just helping spread paranoid stupidity.

  3. Re:I call bullshit. by Igmuth · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And to even get to the point where PeerGuardian (or whatever) can see the frame, it has to pass through his firewall -- presuming that he has one. And that means he either is explicitly allowing that port through or he made the connection himself.

    If you look at the screenshots, you can see he's connecting RDP to 192.168.0.1, which is the typical gateway address on most NATs. I think he might actually be running a WinXP box as a firewall. This would explain how he is seeing all of the packets, with the external destination IP. Therefore I wonder if his XP box has just been rooted.
  4. I doubt it's due to Vista... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    With PeerGuardian, you see all kinds of crap. I doubt anyone is checking up on him due to Vista. It's more likely his IP is confused for one running P2P.

    I mean, hell, 38.100.26.190 (SafeNet / MediaSentry) has been DoSing me with 10 connections/second bursts for ages now because I once clicked the wrong torrent but you don't see me writing Slashdot stories over it.