Monday, October 09, 2006

Public Service Message from the Reformed Chicks

Better make sure your PC has up to date anti-virus software and firewalls:

Home PCs could be under attack from hackers over 50 times a night, suggests a BBC News Website experiment.

The BBC News Website team set up a honeypot' PC – a computer that looks like a normal PC online but records everything that's done to it – in order to find out the dangers facing web users.

Every single time the 'honeypot' was put online it was attacked. In one of the busiest nights of malicious online activity, the computer was attacked 53 times:

1 hijack attempt. PC suffered buffer overflow attempt to subvert web server built into Microsoft Windows. A successful attack would hand over control of the machine to a hacker
2 "port scans" which look for weak spots in Windows software - reconnaissance by hackers seeking new victims.
11 attacks by the 'Blaster' worm - success would have rendered the machine unusable
3 attacks by the 'Slammer' worm - success would have left machine crippled and prone to crashing
36 fake security announcements/adverts for fake security software posing as warnings. Reacting to these could leave a PC clogged with spyware.
It's so annoying that we have spend so much money protecting our computers from these thieves.

(Link via Drudge Report)