Computer Protection

[TheTerrorist_75]

Port scans. Not ShieldsUP from the webs most infamous salesman.

http://www.hackerwatch.org/probe/

[Chappy]

why would a hacker want to get into your compt

unless you are a bank or a bizness man

i cant see the reason

i read where hackers only enter 2 percent

of the recipeints compt

and 99 percent go for a valid reason

not because they want to get into

tonys or martys compt

ive use a compt for ten years

[nine of them has been as a learner]

and no hacker has been into mine

nor ninety percent of the posters here .

so i cant see your reasoning

marty

Hi Marty

The most common reason hackers try to find a vulnerable computer is NOT to steal your info or things like that, it's to silently take control of it so that it can be used in a DDOS (Dedicated Denial Of Service) attack on someone's web site or servers.

Hackers will scan literally millions of machines to find any that are open and useable for this purpose, and can scan huge blocks of IP's at a time, looking for open machines. I myself, have a scanner that can do all this but I use mine for "White Hat" purposes and not for the dark side of things. Hackers will attempt to gain access to any machine found vulnerable from their scans, and drop a backdoor Trojan that will sit silent and unknown until the hacker has enough machines (1000's) and is ready for the attack. Then he sends out a broadcast packet to all these machines at once, which turns them into zombie attack machines and all this can happen without the person ever knowing their machine is doing so. The vulnerable computers are only used to send millions of request packets to a single site or server so that it becomes overwhelmed by all the traffic and can no longer keep up, and is basically shut down.

Thats the most common use of a vulnerable machine and the main reason that Windows "one way" firewall (inbound only) is not recommended. With a two way firewall, even if someone DOES get into the machine and sets it up to attack something, the firewall will pick up the outbound traffic and notify the user that something's not right and the user can stop the packet traffic.

There definately are many hackers that do want to steal your info, but nowhere near as many as there are that just want your machine to use for an attack machine. But I guess that many of these types of hackers may also try to steal your info once they're inside anyway...