Rules & Organization
Depending on how big, structured, and organized you would like these LAN parties to, I would suggest writing up some basic rules and what will happen if the rules are broken. The reason I say this is because if you don't know these people personally, there's always a good chance of one party crasher showing up, who'll go out of his way to cheat & hack at games, cause damage to personal computers, causing general mayhem, or even possibly becoming violent.
When I helped run one small LAN party, we required that everyone's machine was subjected to an AV scan before hooking into our network. We had a small boot CD with an AV scanner on it and just ran a quick scan on their hard drives. Could've been more thorough, but it stopped several people from bringing machines in that were infested with propagating worms. And for the most part about 98% of the individuals didn't mind the scan at all. Of course we didn't have very many people, only about 25 - 30 so I can't really see this being feasible at all if you're planning on more than 50 people attending.
But that's just one of the realities we must remember as far as security is concerned. There is always the chance a virus may become propagated across the network, and always the chance some 'script kiddie' tries to break into other machines on the network too. Best thing is to just make people aware of the virtual security aspect, and make it clear that it's not your responsibility if their machine gets hacked, virused, or data loss occurs.
A customer brought in their computer because they thought they had a virus because the computer was running slower. So they installed Kaspersky and it "found a virus" which happened to be explorer.exe. Sadly for this guy, it ended up costing him $120. Is it possible he could get his money back from Kaspersky? I doubt it.
I seriously doubt it happened to just a handful of people if I happened to get a customer with this issue.
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Your steelfoil hat is more of an amplifier than a shield.. I much more prefer my rubber cushioned lead helmet..
What is going to keep the pirates from using something like this to their advantage?
The boss doesn't have to be right, the boss just has to be the boss.
Rules & Organization Depending on how big, structured, and organized you would like these LAN parties to, I would suggest writing up some basic rules and what will happen if the rules are broken. The reason I say this is because if you don't know these people personally, there's always a good chance of one party crasher showing up, who'll go out of his way to cheat & hack at games, cause damage to personal computers, causing general mayhem, or even possibly becoming violent. When I helped run one small LAN party, we required that everyone's machine was subjected to an AV scan before hooking into our network. We had a small boot CD with an AV scanner on it and just ran a quick scan on their hard drives. Could've been more thorough, but it stopped several people from bringing machines in that were infested with propagating worms. And for the most part about 98% of the individuals didn't mind the scan at all. Of course we didn't have very many people, only about 25 - 30 so I can't really see this being feasible at all if you're planning on more than 50 people attending. But that's just one of the realities we must remember as far as security is concerned. There is always the chance a virus may become propagated across the network, and always the chance some 'script kiddie' tries to break into other machines on the network too. Best thing is to just make people aware of the virtual security aspect, and make it clear that it's not your responsibility if their machine gets hacked, virused, or data loss occurs.
A customer brought in their computer because they thought they had a virus because the computer was running slower. So they installed Kaspersky and it "found a virus" which happened to be explorer.exe. Sadly for this guy, it ended up costing him $120. Is it possible he could get his money back from Kaspersky? I doubt it. I seriously doubt it happened to just a handful of people if I happened to get a customer with this issue.
I went onto Google and searched for "Search Engine" and Google didn't even show up in the results. O_o