:: 08-Apr-2000 01:48 (Saturday) ::
As an update to my previous plan I thought I would inform those of you
who have open share or who are wondering if you are open to attack.
So with that said, here is some info. You might want to take a look at
http://www.grc.com/ and use the ShieldsUP utility to test your computer
for vulnerabilities and information about how to secure yourself. This
web site has some great info on how secure your machine and info on products
you might want to look into. Follow the sheilds up links and read carefully.
ZoneLabs also has a free for personal-use firewall at
http://www.zonelabs.com/ that you may wish to consider installing. This
product is very easy to use and best of all is free for your personal use.
With this info to read and look at, we should get to the root of the
problem. Open windows shares. You might have thought it a great idea to
be able to share files with your freinds, family, coworkers, and the like.
But when you set up your windows shares, you decided that you wanted these
people to be able to write, change, and share data. So you said no when
windows gave you the option to set a password on the share.
So now you can share your files with others without needing them to know
a password. Great! Wrong! You have now completely opened your computer to
anyone who has net access to you. You should consider the need for shares.
If you do not need share at all, turn them all off. If you need to just
make info available to people you might consider sharing a single folder
and making it read-only. If you need to share data and need someone to
alter that data, you might want to consider sharing a single folder and
password protect that share. After that you should remove all share that
you do not need.
So what do you do to close your shares? Well first of all, you can shut
your shares off buy going to Control Panel–>Network and turn off file
sharing, or unbinding it from the TCP/IP interface totally.
If you think you were infected please contact help@distributed.net
Well I hope I didn’t bore you too much.