| From John Dierks,
12/10/2002 - More Virus countermeasures
I've had myself set up for automatic email scanning for a couple of years now, so I'm pretty well set up to deflect viruses (Goner shut down Tektronix for about a day, but my home system just calmly quarantined those sent to me). However, there's another aspect to security that you might want to let folks in on: The class of programs that you install on your PC innocently, and behind your back they "phone home" to deliver demographic (and God knows what other) information to the home office. A lot of these programs are sold by otherwise "reputable" companies (NetZip and others). My strategy has been as follows: 1. Use the "Test my Shields" and "Test my Ports" utilities on www.grc.com to identify the vulnerabilities of my system to external probing. I found my system as installed using MS recommended defaults was wide open!. Following the instructions Steve Gibson provided, I closed all doors but one. 2. Then I got the (free) Zone Labs personal firewall, ZoneAlarm. With it, the last open door was closed, and now I am in full stealth mode. About every other time I log onto the Internet, ZoneAlarm reports the IP address of some external program has tried to probe me, which it refused access.
So the bottom line is I believe you not only need automatic virus
scanning of all
incoming mail, but also a firewall to thwart all the net robots out
there that are
randomly scanning for vulnerable PCs. |