Internet Security

Lots of virus out this week for vindow so stay away from porno & gaming sites & hopefully you got a antivirus software. If not go get your your for free at

http://www.download.com/3120-20-0.html?qt=antivirus&tg=dl-2001&search.x=0&search.y=0&search=+Go%21+

Just a note about using a non-identifiable e-mail address when registering for wsg. SOMETIMES, not always, but 1 time out of 30-40, when you click on http://www.wsgforum.com/ You will be served up with ANOTHER member's header page (the very top part) as in:
Welcome back 11Bravo. You are currently a Senior Member
If you are a Regular Member, then you don't need to apply for an upgrade to Regular Member. Thanks
Your current membership email address is: xxxxxxxxx
Is your email address active? Have you checked your email recently for WSG Forum messages?

Maybe it has something to do with having the options set to yes for:
Automatically login when you return to the site? (uses cookies)
Browse board with cookies?

As an example, I was just served up with: Member2326's info. I know his e-mail address used to register for the forum, and I know he has 0 messages. Hitting the reload button will bring up YOUR correct page.

So, use an e-mail address that you don't mind others seeing.

11Bravo,
you need to click on forum logoff & it will log you off completely.
See the wsgforum.jpg

loverboy

Attention all,

Senior Member HarryR
Posts: 318 Is the owner of Pic 0bj04.jpg. I got PM saying I did not give him credit. But discussion here is Internet Security anyway dosen't matter to me?

Lets give
Senior Member HarryR 100 POINTS Credit

I use Spy Sweeper. It seems to work well and I get regular updates. I even caught a key-logger on a work computer.

QUESTION: How secure is WSG? Can a hacker or LE "hunt you down" from our posts or invading the site?

Da Bone

[blue]Short Answer: No.[/blue]

Uh, Jackson? Sorry, that should be a yes. Ever hear of carnivore?

The bottom line is yes, they can. The good news is that it would take the resources of a nation-state and, in the case of LE, a court approved tap.

Another bit of good news is that Jackson would probably not release any logs or IP address´without said court order. But even if he refused, the ISP and hosting service would.

The best news is, that "they" (whoever "they" is) would simply not bother.

Y'all,

This has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with WSG, but it looks so nice - here it is:

http://www.hamar.sk/sphere/

Go check dat shit out!

I posted this on the "Letters to the Editor" section, and at the suggestion of the Editor will repost it here.

Re: Safety on the Internet and cookies.

The Internet is a dangerous place and you never know who may be monitoring your activities. PC software, particularly WINDOWS, is pathetically insecure. Your hard drive may contain many things you would not like others to see, even if you think you deleted it!
I devised a cheap and foolproof method of getting rid of all traces of your Internet surfing from your PC. This also works if you pick up a virus you can't get rid of or when your hard drive crashes.

It is tedious to create but your PC can always be in a pristine state. (Hey! I'm a poet!).

You need to have software that will make a backup of your system to CDR (NERO Burning ROM is the one I use).

1. Take a backup of your hard drive before you start all this, so that if something gets hosed you can always restore to this backup.

2. Copy to a different CDR all of your preferred site addresses and Email address book. I set mine up using WORD so that I can cut and paste the addresses to the action bar and hit "GO". Find a good hiding place for this disk.

3. Perform a FULL reformat your hard drive to clean off everything. NOTE: this may take some time as it erases everything on every track of your HD.

4. Load your WINDOWS software - from scratch.

5. Reinstall all the other applications you use - from scratch (Virus scan, ISP, Word processor, CD player, NERO, etc.).

6. Fire up your Firewall software and set preferences.

7. Log In to your ISP (at this point you have NO cookies(and NO viruses), so you will have to go through the login procedure) and set up your preferences (Click on VIEW and then set up your Internet settings).

8. Open up your Email account (you should not have lost any of your Email or address book).

9. Logoff your ISP. (Your computer is now pristine with basic ISP cookies and NO viruses).

10. Take a backup to CD of your hard drive again. This will be your Start-up set.

11. Test this Start-up set by running it to restore your hard drive including accessing your ISP. If it works OK, destroy the backup you took at step 1 by melting the CDs with a blowtorch to get rid of all previous evidence.

12. You can now cruise the Internet with a modicum of confidence. Every time you think you have too much incriminating stuff on your hard drive, restore to the Start-up set. Remember, every photograph you download and every site you visit can be extracted from your computer by an expert (LE?) unless you periodically wipe it clean! (Most of the time you DELETE something from your hard drive, the software simply changes a flag to say the track that the data was on is free to reuse, but it doesn't physically overwrite the track to remove the data. Tools are available to reset this flag so that the original data can be read again).

13. P.S. A tip on downloading photographs and movies: Never go direct to your hard drive. I use a ZIP 100 mb drive and then copy to CD. After the copy to CD, I delete the files on the ZIP disk and then copy the huge "Program Files" folder to the ZIP disk. This ensures a complete overwrite of every track on the ZIP disk ensuring security.

Jack, Excellant!
I used to use the same technique to build PC's. 20 pc's, all the same hardware all the same image. Any problems...one restore disc!
I never thought to use it for security.
I'm on it!

Thanks,

AL

Always Lookin,

I've worked in the IT field for a long time and have experienced many of those "Duh!" moments when you suddenly realize there was a real simple solution to a problem.

Glad to provide a "Duh!" moment for you :-)

Please feel free to share this technique with any other vulnerable folks you know.

I always laugh at the dumshits who get raided by LE who find illegal pics (CP, etc.) on that person's computer. The reports usually say that LE also found some kind of Hard Disc Cleaner software (which, obviously, didn't work!)

I just need to keep the wife and the boss from finding out my WWW browsing habits (especially THIS site).

Happy Hunting.

Hey, Sporatic does that mean the short answer is still 'no'? :)

Rolly Polly,

It depends on exactly what your personal level of comfort is. For ME it is an acceptable risk, with the precautions I personally take.

Having said that, I think full disclosure is important so each one of may evaluate their own risks.

Cheers,

Sporadic

If you are really paranoid, get a knoppix live cd to do your browsing.

It loads into the ram and doesnt need to even write at all to the HD.

A full fledged linux distro with web browser, email, office suite, etc. It does most of the basic networking for you, given a LAN connection of some sort. IE, with a card, and not a modem.

But you will have to RTFM. I know alot of windows users can't abide that, but that's the way it is.

And of course, you should stop using IE and use Mozilla Firefox on your Windows box, otherwise you most certainly will get that nasty Cool WEb Search and the Porn Dialers.

When Firefox deletes your history, it REALLY deletes it, unlike IE, which as I understand it, has a file somewhere of all hosts visited that it won't erase.

And there's eraser at [url]http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/[/url] to give you a serious clean up that probably will stymie even the FBI from trying to recover your data.
Free. Open Source. Like the Knoppix disk.

Hope this helps!

Nanio,

Yes indeed, in Windows you can't get rid of the '.dat' files. Windows claims it needs them.
But good old DOS is here to help:
Restart in DOS, you get C:\windows>
Type:deltree cookies, click yes
Type:deltree tempor~1, click yes
Same for any folder you want to get rid of, like:
-temp
-history
Restart windows by pushin' cntr+alt+del
Windows will rebuild the folders you removed in DOS, but the .dat files in them are..... empty!

Get yourself a copy of 'eraser' to completely overwrite the empty space on the HD(s) every now and then.

To reduce the amount of space you have to worry about, reduce the size of your C-drive to a minimum, let's say 'what you need +500MB'.

Get a bunch of seperate HD's for the porn:).

As some of you have noticed, the International guide now has a fee to view photos and so on.

Let's just say that I used my credit card. Does anyone know where credit information is stored ?

If this site was to ever come under fire, would the FBI and other agencies have access to such information and persue a presentable prosecution of some extent ?

-007

[QUOTE=Freeler]Nanio,

Yes indeed, in Windows you can't get rid of the '.dat' files. Windows claims it needs them.
But good old DOS is here to help:
Restart in DOS, you get C:\windows>
Type:deltree cookies, click yes
Type:deltree tempor~1, click yes
Same for any folder you want to get rid of, like:
-temp
-history
Restart windows by pushin' cntr+alt+del
Windows will rebuild the folders you removed in DOS, but the .dat files in them are..... empty!

Get yourself a copy of 'eraser' to completely overwrite the empty space on the HD(s) every now and then.

To reduce the amount of space you have to worry about, reduce the size of your C-drive to a minimum, let's say 'what you need +500MB'.

Get a bunch of seperate HD's for the porn:).[/QUOTE]Another way is to use [url=http://www.stevengould.org/software/cleanup/download.html]CleanUp![/url] ... a great free utility that has become a standard install on all the systems I build.

Some good information here. However.....

There are some VERY savy forensics programs now availible to the general public. IMHO only one true way to erase your pc. A strong and I mean STRONG magnetic field.

Yes you can re-format your hard drive. Yes this will delete whatever files you have. BUT the file fragments will still exist, kind of like the old ghost images on TV's from the 80's. I have heard that you could reformat a hardrive 12 or more times and still be able to recover some of the files.

Fire is also another option...lol

I've been using HistoryKill for years. Everything seems to run smoother once I get rid of all the things it deletes. Any info on how effective HK is?

[QUOTE=Kindashy3]Some good information here. However.....

There are some VERY savy forensics programs now availible to the general public. IMHO only one true way to erase your pc. A strong and I mean STRONG magnetic field.

Yes you can re-format your hard drive. Yes this will delete whatever files you have. BUT the file fragments will still exist, kind of like the old ghost images on TV's from the 80's. I have heard that you could reformat a hardrive 12 or more times and still be able to recover some of the files.

Fire is also another option...lol[/QUOTE]

My friend in Boston who teaches CS just ran a class experiment where his post doc students reassembled data from a drive that had been wiped 30 times. The only way to be completely sure that a hard drive is no longer readable is to melt down the lifters into liquid. Of couse having one computer for business and another for everything else is highly advisable.

Having more than one regedit program helps out a bit too.

BR

[QUOTE=Captain Stiffy]I've been using HistoryKill for years. Everything seems to run smoother once I get rid of all the things it deletes. Any info on how effective HK is?[/QUOTE]


Just about any history editor will do fine, but not by itself.
This is my main bag of tricks as far as programs I use to maintain security.
There are more, plus a proxy, a hardware firewall, a software firewall, McAfee, spybot s&d and external, dedicated hard drives.

BR

[QUOTE=Benchseats Rock]Just about any history editor will do fine, but not by itself.
This is my main bag of tricks as far as programs I use to maintain security.
There are more, plus a proxy, a hardware firewall, a software firewall, McAfee, spybot s&d and external, dedicated hard drives.

BR[/QUOTE]

That is why I use Fedora

[QUOTE=Theguyed]That is why I use Fedora[/QUOTE]

Does it handle multiple networking and MCE functionality or am I better off staying with the evil empire? How involved would it be to swap out my laptop OS etc anyway?

Now I have to go and rtff over at cnet. Honestly, I would rather do that than waste a half a tank of gas looking for a sw who won't meet expectations.

Bench

[quote]Just about any history editor will do fine, but not by itself.

This is my main bag of tricks as far as programs I use to maintain security.
There are more, plus a proxy, a hardware firewall, a software firewall, McAfee, spybot s&d and external, dedicated hard drives.[/quote]You could just ditch Windows for Linux or but a MAC. All these spy, security issues are really not Internet issues , but problems for "the great unwashed" that use windows.

Cheers

Hey,

Does anyone know how safe this website is? with all the hoopla over the nsa spying led me to wonder if the LEO could trace the IP or register and try to get e mail addresses and force the ISP to reveal the id of the posters here. Maybe I'm being a little paranoid. any thoughts would be great.

[blue]Hi StreetMeat,

You are being paranoid.

The USASexGuide's server is located in Montreal, Canada, well outside the reach of the USA Legal system.

Thanks,

Jackson[/blue]

How does a history/internet browsing cleaner such as Crap Cleaner (CCleaner) compare to the CleanUP and the Eraser products mentioned in earlier posts??
Thanks.
Square Tree

I dunno about those, but cleansweep is a good one I use/have used.



[QUOTE=Square Tree]How does a history/internet browsing cleaner such as Crap Cleaner (CCleaner) compare to the CleanUP and the Eraser products mentioned in earlier posts??
Thanks.
Square Tree[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Northside]You could just ditch Windows for Linux or but a MAC. All these spy, security issues are really not Internet issues , but problems for "the great unwashed" that use windows.

Cheers[/QUOTE]


I'll agree to a point, but Unix alone will not stop someone determined to get into your machine. I am ditching XP for Linux - the downtime will hurt but alot less than having MS anything in my life. As far as Mac, I always thought learning Unix was easier than dropping 3k on a winowed unix system with a killer graphics card. The NeXT machines were great back in the day, I dunno why apple never packaged them into a lappy - they could have dominated the portable market in 1990 that way, but I guess they didn't have their business hats on then.

BSR

I have found that running a LiveCD version of the Linux Operating System offers very good security. Nothing is saved on your hard drive. The best part is that it doesn't use Microsoft Windows for anything!

The hard drive version of Linux is better than windows for internet security. However if the police raid your house, they can access the files on your hard drive. That's why it's best to boot Linux from CDROM. The whole thing runs in RAM and everything you do gets lost when you turn your computer off.

To learn more visit: [url]http://www.knoppix.org/[/url] Be sure to select the appropriate language from the menu at top of web page

Let me know if Knoppix works for you!

Fred

Hi Jackson,

You can tell us in words that your server is in Montreal, Canada but we can never be sure unless we visit your location. You could just as easily tell us your server is in Germany. I was the webmaster for an escort service a few years ago and never new where the server was physically located. You can push files to a server from anywhere in the world with internet access.

I really don't care where your server is located but I sometimes wonder what would happen if the U.S. Government offered you a few million dollars to buy your web site. I know what I would do if the price was right and wouldn't blame you for doing the same. BTW are you CIA, FBI...? Just kidding!

Fred

[QUOTE=Fred Reed]I know what I would do if the price was right and wouldn't blame you for doing the same.
Fred[/QUOTE]

I guess we're all lucky that Jackson is running the show and not you.

Why should you care where the server is? I think that it is generous if nothing else to even tell us where it is, just to ease our minds. Point being that this is an incredible service that Jackson id running for us here without asking us for penny number one. Not to mention there are no pop-ups, excessive adverts etc., oh, and he'll boot without hesitation anyone smelling like LE or anyone that insinuate that there is an outside knowledge of the user database.

If his track record isn't enough for you to go on in and of itself, you should resign your membership immediately. After the denial of service attacks no Senior would rather soon forget not to mention that you don't need to provide any personal information to get on the site in the first place, I think your comment is at best out of place and at worst, anti-thetical to the concepts of trust and anonymity.

/rant

Thank you Jackson, as always, for continuing to do what it is that you do for us. Next time you're in Baltimore the beer, lodging and women will all be taken care of by us.

Benchseats Rock

[QUOTE=Benchseats Rock]

Why should you care where the server is? I think that it is generous if nothing else to even tell us where it is, just to ease our minds. Point being that this is an incredible service that Jackson id running for us here without asking us for penny number one. [/QUOTE]

Not to mention that running this web site has its costs , some of which are not trivial — like Legal fees =

[URL]http://www.usasexguide.info/forum/showpost.php?p=418536&postcount=18[/URL]


p.s. = He never responded to my offer to contribute to a Legal Defense Fund

Is it any good?

[url]http://digglicious.********.com/2007/01/how-nsa-access-was-built-into-windows.html[/url]

It's free.

It's bullet-proof.

It's even got variable levels of overwrite (up to NSA Standards).

Go get it :0)

Oh, and Happy St. Patrick's Day.

Dubliner

Here is a link to a site called Tech Support Alert. Many links to free software are available there along with product evaluations in many software categories. Caveat emptor.

[url]http://www.techsupportalert.com/best_46_free_utilities.htm[/url]

Don't know if this is the right place for this or not, but here goes anyway.

I just recently clicked on a link in a post here to a video at the [url]www.yourfilehost.com[/url] site. Shortly after I got there my computer slowed down noticeably, and though I logged off right away, I still managed to pick up a pretty nasty replicating trojan of some kind. McAfee couldn't find it, and I sure couldn't get rid of it even from DOS.

Long story short. Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware free anti-malware utility did a great job, finding a bunch of infected registry keys, dll's, etc. It's available at [url]www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php[/url].

Bigg Mike

[QUOTE=Fred Reed]The hard drive version of Linux is better than windows for internet security. However if the police raid your house, they can access the files on your hard drive.[/QUOTE]The truly paranoid can always encrypt their filesystem(s). Here's an article describing how to encrypt the / filesystem in linux [url]http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7743[/url], and it contains a reference to an article describing how to encrypt just your $HOME directory. Don't forget your encryption password, or you're screwed.

Windows can do something similar, but I've never used either, so I don't know how good/bad/indifferent a job they do.

Addendum: if you carry a USB thumb drive with any sort of sensitive information on it, you'll probably want to encrypt the thing. These things are ridiculously easy to lose, misplace, or have swiped. For that, you might want to look at TrueCrypt, a free open source encryption program:

[url]http://www.truecrypt.org/[/url]

Since my day job is that of BOFH, let me give thumbs up to CCleaner, Eraser, Malwarebytes, Spybot Search and Destroy, Spyware Blaster and the free AVG anti-virus program. I had a couple of clients come in with a nasty little infection, and Malwarebytes cleaned it right out.

Oh, and the folks who made CCleaner have released a free disk defragmenter
[url]http://www.defraggler.com/[/url]

One should have bootable CD/DVDs to recover a system that doesn't want to load the OS, be it windows or linux. If for no other reason than to be able to copy your important files to an external HD so if you need to do a wipe & load, you won't actually lose anything.

Ultimate boot cd: [url]http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/[/url] has a boatload of diagnostic utilities and recovery tools. Personally, I'm partial to the Clonezilla/Gparted live CD [url]http://gpartedclonz.tuxfamily.org/[/url] to make an image of a freshly installed machine, and acts like the Ghost program in that you can restore that computer back to that image at any time.

And if you're going to sell/give your computer to someone else, you really should get a copy of Darik's Boot and Nuke live CD [url]http://www.dban.org/[/url] and wipe those disks. I'm partial to an 8 pass PRNG Stream erasure, but YMMV.

[QUOTE=Square Tree]How does a history/internet browsing cleaner such as Crap Cleaner (CCleaner) compare to the CleanUP and the Eraser products mentioned in earlier posts??[/QUOTE]I'm not sure how they compare. CCleaner will find your browser's cache and clean it but you have to turn on the secure deletion in the options, and it handles cookies. Eraser would be less useful as it would involve more work to remove the files, and CleanUP appears to just delete temporary files and not in a secure manner.

"delete in a secure manner" means to overwrite the existing file with random data multiple times. The more passes of random data written, the less likely a snooper will be able to glean useful information, even if they "recover" the file.

Without thinking, I went to usasexguide.com instead of usasexguide.info. The com site brought up a bunch of stuff like free movie clips, webcams, etc. So like an idiot I clicked on one, and got a really really nasty virus. It was a little costly and time consuming. If you go to the com site by accident, leave it right away, don't be tempted to try anything there.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The online networking site ******* has identified and barred some 90,000 registered sex offenders from using the site over the last two years, ******* revealed to an investigative task force on Tuesday.

The "shocking" number was 40,000 more than ******* had previously acknowledged, according to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a co-chairman of the task force of state attorneys general looking into sex offenders' use of social networking.

*******, owned by News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media digital division, disclosed the figures to the task force in response to a subpoena.

"This shocking revelation, resulting from our subpoena, provides compelling proof that social networking sites remain rife with sexual predators," Blumenthal said in a statement.

Blumenthal's office said it was awaiting a response to a similar subpoena issued to Facebook, another popular social networking site that his office said also might host "substantial numbers of convicted offenders."

Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly said in a statement it was working with Blumenthal's office but said the site had "not yet had to handle a case of a registered sex offender meeting a minor through Facebook."

"Unlike ******* or other social networking sites, Facebook has always enforced a real-name culture and has developed and deployed social verification and powerful privacy rules that allow people to interact in a safer and more trusted environment," the statement said.

Two years ago, ******* commissioned background verification firm Sentinel Safe Tech Holdings Corp. to create a national database of sex offenders after reports that some of its teenage users were abducted by sex predators.

Sentinel operates a U.S. database of sex offenders that includes as many as 120 details for each offender, from their names and addresses to their scars and tattoos, Sentinel Chief Executive John Cardillo said.

Before the national database was created, information on convicted sex offenders was available only locally.

******* said on Tuesday the technology had enabled it to identify 90,000 users as registered sex offenders -- people who have been found guilty of sex crimes and ordered to register with law enforcement officials -- and had removed and blocked them from the site.

"We can confirm that ******* has removed these individuals from our site and is providing data about these offenders to any law enforcement agency including the Attorney General's in Connecticut," *******'s Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement.

(Reporting by Edith Honan; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Philip Barbara)