[Namron] Save a bundle on Windows XP!

Lissa Guillet lissa at missliss.org
Wed May 19 07:25:06 PDT 2004


On Tue, 2004-05-18 at 08:05, mikea wrote: 
> On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 07:18:04AM -0500, marc adkins wrote:
> > Would someone PLEASE do something about this NOW!!!  
Unfortunately Willy, viruses that people get from emails are self
replicating and often stay there doing bad things like spam. Bad bad
stuff. And even more unfortunately, the writers of these viruses tend to
originate in jurisdictionally difficult places for the US to prosecute,
ie, Russia and Korea just to name two off the top of my head. Even
worse, they sell their spamming method as a means for others to
consistently reach tens of thousands of people safely and without the
need for a return email address. It's advertised as a cheap(as in the
russian and korean economy cheap) and simple, hands off means of sending
an advertisement.

As to the firewall solution, better yet, have someone who knows what
they are doing help you purchase a cablemodem or ADSL "modem" with a
firewall coded in. And have them set everything up. Firewalls can be
somewhat complex and if you suddenly can't get into your internet
connection, most ISP's will NOT help you configure it correctly. And
then you won't have internet access at all to research what you did
wrong.

Even with a decent firewall setup, most people will want less of an
issue. If you play everquest or other online games that make a
connection into your machine on a random port, then you will likely want
to open your firewall up and set your main computer as DMZ host which
more or less reduces the firewall to a connection logging machine.

So I would say, even more importantly, keep your windows up-to-date with
microsoft at windowsupdate.microsoft.com. It will install necessary
security patches and driver packages (and other stuff not needed if you
want like the latest media player which comes with it's own set of
security issues. Yay for OS integration of everything.)

Run some kind of antivirus software. Download ad-aware and have it sweep
your computer clean of about 300 items that you've said yes to that you
didn't know would let others keep track of your browsing habits, email
addresses, and a host of other things so that they could send it to
advertisers. Pay attention to what is removed and don't click yes to
every little activex control that wants to attach itself to your system.
Parasitic programs can be as bad as viruses

I would also add, never open an attachment of the nature pif,exe,com,bat
and don't run any of these that is contained within a zip file. There
are a lot of nasties out there. I get emails from IBM all the time where
someone there has opened one of these files. It's incredibly annoying.
You'd think they would know better.

I've been in internet computing for 10 years and have only had a virus
on two occasions. The first was when someone else put an infected floppy
in my machine and I was unaware and away from my desk. Poor thing had no
clue and the big issue was that I was writing the software that went out
to all of our clients. It could have been really bad. The next time was
when I was attached to a very large network infected network that had a
virus that was attacking through an RPC call that if I had had my
computer patched I would not have gotten. =)

In essence, without some sort of Bayesian filter or advanced warning
system on the mailing list server itself, you will just have to put up
with this kind of thing occasionally. =/ But at least you can be safe
and prevent yourself from being the victim of such a thing.



More information about the Namron mailing list