Monday, July 19, 2004

Security Level: Orange

Over the past few days I have been getting an abnormal amount of port scans on my network. The scans don't really go anywhere because they are against my WAN IP and not my actual network. My WAN IP is part of my ISP and there is nothing at the IP they have been testing. So why does it keep happening? Beats me. Though since I am paranoid like that, I have starting taking new measures to prevent attacks and snooping against my network.

Sooner or later I was going to format my system partition and do a clean install of XP Pro and so I decided to do that at 1am last night. I popped Service Pack 2 RC2 on there and have been impressed with the broader range of functionality it added to the basic Windows firewall. Overall, SP2 is great for those that use IE6 because that is where the majority of changes are noticable. I use Firefox so I could care less.

Anywho, I think I am going to try out Zone Alarm on my main system and see how that does. I also made some changes to my router. I am feeling a tad more secure now and all security really is anyway is a mental state. You are never truly secure.....ever. If someone wants at you or your systems and they are determined, THEY WILL FIND AWAY. That happy thought of the day stems from my finishing Kevin Mitnick's book, "The Art of Deception". It is amazing how crafty some people are and how stupid everyone can be given any situation. Mitnick's book is a good read, though I question his intent when writing the piece.

Next on the list of things to do is to wipe my laptop and do a clean install on this. Once that is done I will bo good to go until Christmas time when I do my Yule Tide formatting. It makes my computer feel new and more like a Christmas gift. :) Yeah, I am a tad pathetic. But for now, it is time to get some sleep.

1 Comments:

At 5:56 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Art of Deception is an enlightening book to say the least. I thoroughly enjoy it.

Yeah, security is mostly psychological. I have been kind of lax about securing my system because I have a hardware firewall between the internet and me. I ought to do a more through job of setting up my machine's software firewall, but I'm lazy. :)

-HungSquirrel

 

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