posted 07-22-2001 23:47            

quote:

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Originally posted by PrezMonty:
Being as behind-the-times and uninformed as I am, anyone want to explain the 'Code Red' virus thing to me? My dad's talk radio station has been blabbing about it and the "evils" of broadband connections (What, now the republicans want to keep CONNECTION SPEEDS in the stone ages?) nonstop for the past 3 days.

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Dirty details and story behind the name: http://www.eeye.com/html/Research/Advisories/AL20010717.html

even M$ supposedly got hit: http://www.smartguys.net/mshacked/

This worm is classic! Microsoft released a patch a month ago (MS01-033), sent out advisories, and even put a blurb on their home page about it. Anyone running IIS (like me ) should know by now to at least check M$ weekly for patches.

posted 07-23-2001 08:01         

in short more bandwidth availibility means more stupid people to take advantage of and even people with some idea of what they are up against are at a disadvantage because of their constant exposure. the number of victims with constant connection and bandwidth to burn has made things like mddos attacks possible. it also gives people looking to do breakins on more secure sites (like govt. databases, perhaps) more places to hide while they do their work.

that's probably what gets a radio show worked up about broadband. you're exposing government and industry to increased security threats in exchange for downloading files a little bit faster. and let's be honest; these people probably aren't happy about the contents of those files you're downloading anyway.

posted 07-23-2001 20:37         

!) the problem with people with no sk1lls is that they have no damn skills. they don't know they have a problem to begin with and if they have heard bad stories to give them a second thought about it, they probably have no idea what to actually do about it.

!!) hmmm... didn't know about sys tray connection icon. shows i'm a little behind the times but i'm still on win95 for my windows partition and my old lan connection never had an icon. it required releasing my ip manually from winipcfg or else changing the network settings and rebooting. i guess they've fixed that up in the newer revisions. still, that doesn't help when you're downloading a large file and you won't be around for a while. you can either sit and watch 650mb of an iso tick away or allow that your computer will have some unsupervised time.

3) hibernate is only useful if you're leaving the computer alone. it doesn't help if you have a download running or if you need to do something on your computer that does not require connectivity.

iv) firewalls are nice, but it comes down to a question of who's going to run them. tards won't, and probably won't even know what one is. if isps run them, the only way to make it effective at all would be an elephant gun - blocking all the service ports to prevent someone from doing something stupid. that still wouldn't stop everything, since client exploits like irc worms and ie bugs would still work. and once the hack is in place it's just a matter of time before a couple hundred million requests leveled at the target site.

alright, start picking this apart now.

posted 07-23-2001 22:48            

I have been doing a little tech support over at a friends house ... a youngish mother with a cable connection and an AOL overlay because it is far superior (natch).

Lon: So, do you use a firewall?
WayOL: Heh, what's a firewall?
Lon: (explains)
WayOL: (blank stare)
Lon: (breaks it down a little)
WayOL: (drools)
Lon: (smiles turns around and rolls a fat one before going to the kitchen for a shot of rum)