check out the size of this bass

[b16a2racer]

man this is awesome

[STEVE IN MASS]

That was NOT FUNNY......don't do it people.

In fact, don't you have anything better to do on Thanksgiving Day?



John, would advise you to remove the link as soon as you see this....e-mail or PM me for details if ya must........

[capesams]

NOT SMART

[LuaP73]

I guess there is always 1 a$$ in the bunch . I hate when people have nothing beter to do than to cause trouble ...... Now I have to worry if there is something wrong with my new computer because of this clown . There are alot of great people here and I guess that I let my guard down, I got too comfortable now I know that there are jerks everywhere!!!!!

[JohnR]

OK - first off - I mangled the link so it won't take you there...


b16a2racer - WTH were you thinking? Send me an e-mail with an explanation on this before posting again... That opened numerous windows, including telnet sessions and more, and now I need to do a security review on my PC.

[Mr. Sandman]

This kind of trash posting is the worse IMO. I would ban him and his IP from the board and notify his ISP what he is doing. He is violating his ISP agreement and will get the boot there too.

[BEETLE]

I agree with Mr. Sandman - John does not need to deal with this BS - he's busy enough already !!

[STEVE IN MASS]

Thanks, John....but one thing....

"That opened numerous windows, including telnet sessions and more, and now I need to do a security review on my PC."

Wonderful.........um, what do ya need to do? as I opened the link as well.....

Will Symantic AV software take care of this? (I think not, since yo said you needed to do a check yourself, and I know you are AV protected to the max!)

Thanks..........

[JohnR]

Steve & everyone, when you get something opening like that, the first thing to do if you are not totally aware of what to do is unplug the back of your computer by disconnecting power. Sure, a hard crash of your machine is usually not good but where it's opening numerous applications, and in this case outbound telnet sessions to something else, it's your quickest prevention of problems...

Then, reboot your computer with the network cable disconnected. You should run a full virus scan on your machine, in DOS with a emergency disk if you know how, before going back online. If you don't know how to do this, at least run a full scan in normal mode. Also watch your system's behaviour closely.

There are other things to do, but they become very diverse by tech skill level and system OS and are really beyond the scope of what I can post here...

Anti-virus can protect from a lot but there are a lot of loopholes as well... I'm still scanning my machine, as I've scanned 575000 files so far (I got a lot of stuff ) but so far, no viruses.

I HIGHLY recommend that everyone run both the latest Anti-virus software (on every computer) AND some kind of firewall, hardware or software - especically if you have a high-speed internet connection AND multiple computers accessing the Internet...

As for the firewall? When I'm view logging my home firewall, sometimes I see as many as 5-10 hacking attempts/vulnerability scans per day (port scans, straight attacks, etc...) - A great source for testing machine vulnerability is to go to http://grc.com and run "Shields Up" for a shield test and then run a port probe. There are some very good articles on that site regarding securing personal systems and it would be wort anyone with a broadand connection to follow some of the tips for securing a home system.

Ask away if there are any other questions and I'll do what I can for answering them...

[fishsmith]

Is there any chance that b16a2racer is a recently suspended user(s)?

[JohnR]

I'm looking into that now... Pending further review, his posting is suspended until he e-mails me more details here. There are several possibilities here as well including but not neccessarily a malicious attack on his part. I want to find out more before a permanant decision is made.

[MountainBreeze]

fishsmith,

That was my first thought as well ("recently suspended user(s)"). However, I did a search on his user name, read his posts (6) and the trip he went on / gear doesn't seem to fit the "profile" of a recently suspended user(s).

However, I am sure John can get a better idea by looking at the IP address / log files.

Thanks for cleaning the link up before I got there John!

Hope everyone else makes out well w/ the virus check!

Rob

[JohnR]

FS - Nahh - different guy....

I've had a couple PMs about "WTH is a FIREWALL??" So I'll try to answer it as plain as possible...

When you send info across the internet, that info travels from numbers, like your IP address, across diferent devices called routers which also have their own IP address, until they get to their destination, the IP address for this website for example. So that's how the info, basically, bounces around. Now the other thing which happens is that all the different services that run on these IP addresses are typically given a number between 1-64,000. The most common services, like HTTP, POP E-mail, SMTP e-mail, FTP, DNS, telnet (part today's problem), and blah blah, each have their own service PORT . Common services are applied common ports- HTTP=80, POP E-mail =110, SMTP e-mail = 25 , FTP = 21, DNS = 53, telnet = 23 are typical of this. So if you want somoeone to read your website, you need to allow port 80 to be open on your machine.

Microsoft operating systems - which 99.99 % of the people here exclusively use, leave all this stuff open by default. That means that if someone figured out you IP address, they could find some other typically open port, say file sharing, and potentially sneak onto your machine. What a firewall does is uses a set of rules to close down everything other than what you want to be open coming into you. A good firewall will shut down EVERYTHING coming into it. So if someone trys to get into your system , they need to do it over a port that you have open. Fortunately, with these ports dedicated for the most part, in 99.999% of the cases they can't successfully try to do something over one of the other ports.

So this firewall can be hardware or software and have different levels of sophistication. Best to use a hardware router (like a Linksys BEFSR41) with a built in firewall if you have several computers connecting to the internet thru a cable modem as this will both give the other computers a private address which makes it harder to attack and the firewall portion can prevent more malicious attacks from coming in. These hardware boxes like the Linksys also do something call NAT - Network Address Translation where the hardwars device assumes the public IP address given to you by your ISP and that device gives you a hidden, private number that is not seen on the Internet. This shows up as almost a "stealth mode" becuase the hardware device really doesn't use any ports, it justs sends out the requests that your PC wants.

A software firewall (like Symantec's Internet Security or Zone Alarm) is good for most single PC hookups...

I realize that wasn't probably the best way to put it but I just do them and not talk about them too much
2 things to check out:

http://grc.com/su-firewalls.htm a quick read on firewalls...

and the link I put up earlier on the same site for the shields test: http://grc.com

If you show up under a scan or probe as having ports open, you're looking for trouble


I'll try to answer what else someone asks...

[fishsmith]

Maybe this was a good post after all,
If I ever get flack for hitting this site too much at work, I can justify it as training with your post. I just saved it off to my FIREWALL folder. One of my last projects involved adding firewalls and natting ip addresses to mask them.

[fishweewee]

Whoa, what did I miss?

-WW

[Van]

WOW I've missed alot of turmoil while i was away.

maybe thats a good thing!!!!