Can someone comment on what the guy (late-nite, unsupervised) at the ISP is
capable of? Not long ago, as I was reading my mail at 3:30am, my Zone
Alarm started alerting me that my ports were being scanned progressively,
and that the probe was apparently originating one step upstream from my
machine (at my ISP's DNS address). After about 150 alerts, all in about a
2min timeframe, I disconnected. I printed out the ZA logfile and appended
to it a "What's this?" message and sent it in with my monthly payment, the
outer envelope marked "Attn: Management", with a request "Please reply to
this inquiry", and never received any kind of reply (it's been around 90
days now).
While I don't really expect them to admit to any hanky-panky, other
questions are raised here:
Can they enter my machine (especially when I am FTP-connected to their
server)?
Can they reproduce my screen for their viewing when I am browsing the web?
If so, can they view transaction details generated from my end (credit card
info) when I'm connected to a secure server?
What exactly are they capable of, as far as compromising a dial-up
subscriber's security?
Tom L. McCoy
Fontana CA
"Hold No Punches.." Rode brings you great shareware/freeware
programs with his honest opinions in this weekly column.
http://freepctech.com/rode
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