That's a legitimate question and for good reason. Some of these worms that
propagate through NG's, if anyone has gone to any of these sites that
proport to be one thing and when a body gets there gets 87 popups, before
they can even get out. All the tricky deceetful bullcrap that all these
little twits use like aggravating their little brother, and how much
trepidation they cause and dollars they cost for jillians of workers, who
need their tools to work with. Dam* right it is important. It would make
Mother Teresa paranoid.
A surfboard modem LED flashes when there is anything is inbound or outbound
on your computer. But, the important thing is 99.44% of it legitimate. From
my experience, with the increase of all the hacker traffic by the way of
worms, etux, most of the ISP's for broad band are vigorously scanning all
I.P.'s that they are responsible for their customers. I am very familiar
with Road Runner (have friends that are tier 3) and can say for sure that
data miners (i.e. quickclick, doubleclick, bluestreak, etc.) all send pings
to make sure the information they are selling is accurate. Not really to
probe your ports. And most of the rest are pings and port scans from various
sites that owned by the ISP that you have your service with.
If you are paranoid about it, there are a few things you can do and few
others that you can try.
You can do:
1.) Go to
www.antivirus.com to do an online virus check. They are
constantly improving their site and you may need to look a little, but it is
free and their definitions are up to date at the time you do the scan. And
it is safe.
2.) Go to
www.spychecker.com and go thru the mutiplicity of d/l's they have
full of utilities to help. One is Ad-Aware that I see many post as helpful.
3.) Get SpyBot S&D and don't just trust that everything it finds, you should
nuke. Spend some time and ask someone a quesiton in a SpyBot forum you can
find on Google if what you are about to do is harmful to your computer. I
have to warn you that this program may interfere with some websites you
visit that is completely free, because those folks are in business to make a
living like you, and they have to get revenue someway.
4.) Don't be paranoid or too trusting. Don't open any attachment from anyone
you don't know and scan every attachment that you get from even your firends
and family, because they may have just gotten a worm or virus that make you
think, "Oh, its safe". If you are not expecting an email from them and it
has attachment(s) send them an email to ask them if they sent it. There are
very clever worms that even have their on SMTP servers to send email and can
look thru your cookies to generate a suject you are familiar with.
5.) Don't open anything from Microsoft, especially right now, that says they
are sending you an up date, and it has an attachment, or even worse if they
want personally information like your social security number. b a d. They do
not do this at all.
6.) If you don't have a good AVP, get one right now.
www.grisoft.com has a
free one called AVG, but you have to set up the time scheduler to update
your definitions. I set my defs. up to download 15 minutes before it runs
virus scans. I do mine at 8:00 and 8:15 respectively every evening, because
I am usually on the comupter at that time and it does not interfere with
what I am doing, but I can take a look at the log at soon as it gets
through. If are files that it could not scan, don't worry. Write them down
and do a search for the files, right mouse them and scan them individually.
In fact use the right mouse for a scan on any files you get.
7.) Don't use IM, ICQ, mIRC, or other type things like kazaa, Morpheous to
download crap from the internet or expect to suffer the consequences. Those
juvinille delinquents out there are in their own world. They do destructive
crap, instead of playing ball or going to the Boy Scouts and our world is
only getting started, because they are going to grow up as Psycos and their
kids are gonna be worse, because the parenting skills they are going to
attain, will be teaching their kids things that are exciting to learn like
watching the world go into a panic so they can have a laugh. Do I have
anything to tell you? I am windy.. Just nuke me here if you are tired. i'm
doing this from memory and on the fly, so some of it may not make any sense
either.
Now for the things you can do. Get your self the following and do the
following:
8.) When you do a Fresh Install or if someone else does it for you , because
believe me, you will need to have it done sooner or later, make a safe place
in good order for all of your software, drivers, favorites, address books,
preferences of applications, and backups and ERD's, etc.
9.) Set up your HDD (hard drive) with a partition for OS and applications,
and another for all your data. Be sure to give more than adequate space to
load all applications (W2K like 5gig). Reason being, all the Service packs
"archives" (that's where if you need to unistall the SP for whatever
reason), and many other things you don't count on.
10.)Get Disk Image or Ghost and make an ISO of the basic installation of
the OS and drivers, and if you just have to, you can reload the ISO without
going thru any hassles. You only lose a minimum of time and items that may
be on the application partition. That is with the latest Service Pack.
11.)Make another ISO of the OS and all the basic apps. you are for sure that
you will be running and don't change versions every 6 months. May be
overkill, but it is a lot faster than spending like 1 1/2 days redoing it.
12.)Before you do anything make sure you have AVP and Firewall in place. In
fact do 9.) and 10.) offline.
13.)Check for any updates of drivers and also BIOS.
Trys:
14.)Try locking your firewall with your screen saver, or push the stanby
button on your Surfboard, when you leave for a while.
15.)Shut your computer down at night or when away extended periods of time.
16.)Try helping others on NG's for an hour a night whenever you get to where
you can give back a little.
17.)Try encouraging others to do whatever they can to reduce the tension,
having a computer has caused, and help make it a pleasureable experience.
Don'ts:
14.)Don't download drivers from any place but the manufacturer of the
hardware, if possible.
15.)Don't allow anyone to have your passwords and don't write is down and
tape it to your computer, or put it in a drawer there.
16.)Don't have to put up with my crap. Do what ever you think is safe
enough, and Have agood time.
17.)Don't let others use your computer with you account and be sure to have
an account setup for all users.
I apologize for the tooo lengthly post to you and all others on the NG.
good computing,
don
------
You also can get a keystroke logger that can run a scan at anytime you
suspect hacker traffic on your computer. One free one is Keylog Hunter.
You'll find it in the bunch of stuff on spychecker. There are others for
bucks that do more.
:-0 :-O :^) (dam* shame when people don't have
anything better to do with their time than post as much stuff as I do.)
===========================
Hi,
I'm an Optimum Online subscriber and use a motorola SB4100 Cable
modem. When my computer is on but no apps are open the "Activity"
light on the modem is always flashing. Any idea what causes this? The
old Terayon Terapro modem that @Home used didn't do this. Thanks!
Dan
(e-mail address removed)
Remove NOSPAM from address when replying
