A mate of mine who is non pc literate had a friend of a friend repair his pc .

Said freind of freind said he had left something on my mates pc so that if he ever needed to he could hack in from a remote site.

At the time my mate wasn't to bothered, but now keeps all his business accounts etc on it and wants the security.

So some questions:

a) Is this possible and if so is it something we can spot (I'm not too bad with them).
b) Sepcific reference was made to e-mail, but I suspect my mate let them have his password for his BT Openworld mail so we can change that, but again any other way they can hack into that.

Any other thoughts would be received. Also I have a copy of Norton Firewall that I plan to install for him.

Thoughts greatfully received.

Dave

 

Get a virus scanner installed. That'll check for things like Back Orrifice or other trojans. Otherwise uninstall things like Netmeeting where he could've set up a user account for himself. Also check all the software installed i/c he has added a program like PC Anywhere etc & remove if found.



[Edited by Puff The Magic Wagon! - 11/18/2002 1:34:29 PM]

 

Oh & ask him exactly what he installed!

 

Unless you check each and every file the only way you can be sure is to backup all the stuff your mate wants to keep and do a fresh reinstall. That really is the only way if you want to be 100% sure, and worth it for peace of mind.

Steve.

 

Personally I would back up all the important information and...

.. blow it away and start again! Making sure that some sort of firewall and anti-virus software was installed as well!

 

Me too! Better to start with a fresh system and avoid potential re-occurences of this type of thing.

Use Fdisk to make sure that the partition is deleted and then re-create a new dos partition. Might be an idea to use 1 partition for system files/apps and 1 for data ie c:\ for system and d:\ for data with e:\ being the CD drive. That way you can format the system partition without loosing the files that are important to you.

Hope that helped

 

McAfee VirusScan v7 and McAfee Firewall v4
Updates for scanning new Virus's avaiable weekly
But I would go with the backup all important files and reformat disks and re-image

 

happy to format my own hard disk, not so comfortable doing it for a mate... also we backed up his stuff and he has about 12 disks and no CD re-writer.

Would Norton Firewall pick up an attack?

 

Grab a CD Writer for £50 and get it backed up.

A firewall won't protect his accounts from a hard disk crash....

 

Get a copy of Zonealarm. That asks your permission for everything trying to get access to your PC and everything trying to get out. Basically if you dont give it permission it doesnt get access. I just gave my internet connection permission to connect out, and my MSN messenger.

You can also get trojan scanners, these are different to virus scanners and might pick up stuff that virus scanners miss. Go on any search engine and you'll find some. A particulat favourite is sub7 I think.

 

Norton Firewall will pick up the attacks, but I'm not sure if it will by default. I've got mine set to maximum paranoia level!!

 

Free anti-virus with free regular updates: http://www.grisoft.com

Thanks

Gavin

 

Question on Zone Alarm if I may.....

What decision do you make when you get a request similar to:
"Common Tool #4 is attempting to access the internet"?
WTF is Common Tool #4? There is no info available as to the program that is trying to launch this tool, so I do not know whether I need to let it pass or not (for instance, it might be a software update checking tool)

Also, I have read conflicting views on whether ZA should be used on WinXP machines, but I understand the built-in effort is pretty cack. I am behind a NAT router, so do I really need to continue using Zone Alarm or is the router a strong enough defence?

TIA

 

Don't buy McAfee products - I bought the online virus checker over the weekend and it completely arsed my machine up, including helpful things such as:

- preventing any other application from executing (including itself!)
- alerting me it had found a virus every time I clicked the mouse, but offering no solution and not identifying it
- failing to install despite 5 attempts, removal of every other piece of active software to make it as clean as possible post boot and having to keep removing it from the registry to get the machine going again.

nightmare - I sent an e-mail to their 'rapid' response team on Sunday morning requesting help/ a refund. have heard nothing back. not good.

can anyone recommend another product? Norton?

Gordo

 

I'll fix your McAfee product for you if you like. It's honestly not that bad.

Email me at Jclark@nai.com

 

Don't forget to find the friend of a friend and **** the bastid.