OnLine E-Zine
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• Internet Security

  by Clint Tinsley

  Tim's article on Window's Security Risks and Cookies, which he will be following up on next month with a discussion on Firewalls, discusses the accessing your computer files via the Internet due to file sharing which maybe enabled on your computer (a very bad thing to have happen!) and personal information that might be obtained via cookies.

  In reality, most people unless they have enabled File & Printer sharing or have a modem sharing arrangement via a home network, the issue of Internet access to your personal computer files should not be a concern. I do recommend that you run the shields and ports tests found at www.grc.com to be on the safe-side so that you know for sure. When you run the tests, if all that is found is your "computer identification" information (shown below), this is NOT a problem and some Internet providers even require this information be "displayed" to the Internet in order to use the service as part of their authentication process.

  

  Securing your computer and personal data from prying eyes is actually fairly easy unless you are running a home network and even then, you can make it secure following procedures detailed at www.grc.com, the same web site that Tim recommended for testing your ports. I do run a home network which includes a couple of file servers and following those tips, nothing on my home network behind the modem is visible to outside world other than the arbitrary name I gave my computer. I have done this without resorting to performance impacting personal "firewall" software or a physical "firewall" box between my computer network and the Internet. I am not saying there is not a place for firewalls such as proxies, routers, and packet filtering systems but a very large percentage of users only have one computer making such solutions overkill and unnecessary.

  The bigger threats to your computer are not from what the firewall would keep out. If you want a real eye opener on what can be done from "inside your computer" by someone else, go visit the Symantec home page at www.symantec.com and click on Norton Internet Security Analyzer. That will take you to a page "Analyze Your PC Security" where there are a couple of buttons, one for the Security Analyzer and another for a Virus scan of your computer. Both of these tests download an application from Symantec that run in and I mean IN, Internet Explorer, behind any firewall you might have! While both of these applications are benevolent, one checking the Internet security of your computer and the other, scanning every file on your computer for a virus, imagine what a non-benevolent application could do to your computer. And I performed this test with the ZoneAlert Firewall software loaded on my test computer. The bottom line is that by testing the security of my computer, I learned how insecure my computer was to just one threat - applets and applications that run in IE and Netscape.

  First Line of Defense - E•Mail Scanning
  For a few dollars more...
  

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