how safe are you?

[Robert Lambie]

hi moon.. i have a firewall and antivirus mate.. oh yeh and i have rob, the “pitbull terrior of the web” for the boards… 😉 he tells me we had another attempt by a so called “hacker” on the site the other night.. 😆 oh well.. if your reading this hacker.. nice shot, but lame attempt. the success of this site obviously gets right on your goat, & im glad it does. 😆 😆 let folk go about business & enjoy the web.. spit your dummy and get on with it 😉

how do you find your firewall mate i have zonealarm.. it seems very good.

the anti spam mail.. sounds good.. i think ill give it a go 😉

thanks 😉

[Lee Attewell]

Hey Moon, What a good idea. I had no way of knowing how well protected I was. I’m glad all came up blocked.

Thanks for the link.

Lee

[Phill Fenton]

I tested my home system with this link, and I was delighted to see that it passed all of the tests with everything blocked. This is strange cos I don’t have a firewall installed (?) 😕 😕

[JPH]

I have a Win2000 Server running IIS5 and SQL Server. Its was a hackers dream till I got Sygate and Sophos AV. Had a big problem with Nimda and then the SQL Slammer worm. Still get lots of SQL Worm attempts but none are successful.

All in all its probably cost me two days work to get the system sorted and clean cos of half-wits with nothing better to do.

Now downloading mail washer to see if I can get rid of the viagra, big willy and casino spam.

Jason

[Administrator 2]

Our test server at work got hit with slammer as well, that was a real pain. was only our development server so was simple enough to fix, but we were told that we were safe and should have been given the design of our networks, but there are a number of different groups responsible for IT and some idiot had an SQL server in the “Extranet” so the worm snuck it’s way through.

What do you run on your windows 2000 machine? I’ve stoped using windows as a server OS at home, mostly cos it’s soo much more hacked than windows is. I’ve found that SME Server is a very nice linux setup that works very well in a server role for a windows network, the only thing you can’t do is run those annoying little windows only apps on it. The best part is that it’s free! The financial modle for linux is not based on purchase costs, but on services that they sell. they do all sorts of nice things, even up to monitoring your server for you, virus scanning e-mails and the like.

I’ve got some really good Spam defeating technology, tho I can’t recall the URL at this moment, I’ll dig it up and post it, it’s server side tho so most people can use it, but if you run your own mail server it’s brilliant.

[JPH]

I’m developing an Intranet system for a company that uses Win2K and SQL Server 2000. Its easier for me if I replicate their system (though it wasn’t easy on the wallet). I was using W95 for about 3 years before finally going all modern with W98 (in about 2001)… I don’t do latest technology.

I’ve worked with Red Hat and Apache which, once I’d got used to them, I quite liked, but RH6.2/7 didn’t install on my home system so I bunged PHP and mySQL onto an NT4 Server with IIS4 instead.

Jason

[Lorraine Buchan]

As some of you have said, I too have tested with this and come up with a completely secure computer all tests blocked again strange as i have no firewall.

But….. If you notice at the bottom of the test page

You have blocked all of our probes! We still recommend running this test both with
and without Sygate Personal Firewall enabled… so turn it off and try the test again.

Looks like they think you have already installed their software!!!

[Administrator 2]

tests like that one are like trying the door handle on your car to make sure you remembered to lock it.

knowing it’s locked dosn’t mean that the lock is any good, or that the alarm is working…

and knowing it’s unlocked isn’t always a bad thing, that test claims I’m at risk, but I want to do the things it calls a risk cos I’m doing it for a reason (you can’t use a car and keep it locked all the time 🙂 )

as far as such tests got that’s not a bad one, it’s checking to see what ports are being listened on. if you’ve got a new version of windows often all the ports are closed. and it proably only says “your safe” cos it assumes that you’re testing your system after installing thier software.

I use http://www.e-smith.org/ as a web/SQL/file/windows doamin server
and http://www.astaro.com/ as my firewall router connection to the web
and http://tmda.net is the best way to kill spam, but it’s serverside only AFAIK

if you ever need any help in dabbling with linux I’m sure I can help you out, either directly, or by pointing you in the direction of someone who can, which is by far the best thing about linux 🙂