On 2 Jun 99, at 7:45, Bob Wright wrote:

> At 06:19 AM 6/2/99 , Elizabeth Boston wrote:
> >Good Morning,
> >        I have a reader with the following problem...
> >
> ><<<I am very concerned about a problem we have. My daughter gave
> >this boy her icq# at school, not realizing he was very strange
> >and now somehow he has hacked into our computer and reads all her
> >personal talk and who knows whatelse. We are new at the computer
> >and really don't know how to stop him from doing this. She has
> >tried to block him, but he still hacks. Any help?>>>
> >
> >        How does a computer novice stop someone from breaking into their
> >computer in this manner?
>
>
> It does not take any real skill  to crack into a system with the powerful
> ICQ hack utilities available on the Internet today.   Based on what you
> have said above, I would offer these options to your client:
>
> 1)   Drive over to this child's home and explain the problem to his parents,
>       explaining what their child is doing is illegal

  I'd try to arrange for witnesses or recording of this.  I'd like to believe
it will work, but if it doesn't there could be some secondary benefit in
establishing that the parents were informed about what was going on, especially
if he is a juvenile.

> 2)   Call the police and explain the situation, (any form of hacking is a
> felony)

  I'm not certain this is true; it may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
To get the FBI involved, you generally have to establish that the system is
"federal interest" (banking, cross state lines, there's half a dozen
possibilities) and that at least $1000 of damage has been suffered; even
then, I believe it's only a felony if deliberate/malicious -- I think
ignorant/negligent is only a misdemeanor.
  On the other hand, this may qualify as "harassment" or "stalking", and the
use of the computer may be incidental and legally irrelevant....

  I would recommend consulting a lawyer before steps 1 & 2.  Note that one
picked at random may not be current on the relevant laws and technologies --
see if there's a local referral agency (your state bar association *may* be
able to help) that can direct you to one who has dealt with cases like this.

> 3)   Stop using ICQ, remove it from the computer

  My suspicion is that while he may have initially "gotten in" via ICQ, he's
probably using other tools now.  This will keep him from getting *back* in
the same way when you remove those tools, but it probably won't BY ITSELF stop
his current antics.

> 4)  Visit the wonderful world of hackers, or pseudo-hackers/hacker wannabies
>     to download "anti-ICQ-hack" utilities for the system:  You can begin at this
>     URL  http://www.hack.cc/icq.html  ; they have some protection utilities to
>     download


> They should also spend some time at Mirabilis reading about firewall
> protection for their system:  http://www.mirabilis.com/firewall/     They
> can set the application to function with firewalls and protect their
> computer from unwanted intrusions. This often will provide all the security
> they will need, but in saying that, every time good security is built,
> someone will design a hack that makes it easy to move through such security
> and distribute it on the Internet.  It then takes little or no real
> knowledge to use the hack application to become an aggressor against
> others.

  This mirabilis page is aimed at users who are ALREADY protected by a firewall,
and need to configure ICQ to talk past that security.  In that context,
"firewall" generally refers to a dedicated box filtering traffic; most home
users don't have that kind of hardware hooked up.
  There are some "firewall" software programs; I use and like one called
"AtGuard Personal Firewall" which runs under Windows 95, 98 and NT; I believe
I paid about $15 for it although that may have been a special promotion --
regular price might be as much as $35.
  Note that a firewall program should keep him from snooping around "in" the
machine.  It may not stop him from crashing the machine, from making its net
connection unusable ("Denial of Service"), or, if both households are on the
same ISP or cable-modem system, it *may* not keep him from watching traffic
to/from the rest of the Internet.

> This is why I highly recommend confronting this boy child head on, since he
> is only playing games, sitting in the dark of his room believing he is anonymous.
> Stripping away his cloak of anominity will do more to stop the problem than
> anything.

  I'm not sure this is true -- apparently the family has a pretty good idea
who is doing this.  It's easy to speculate about motivations at third,
fourth, fifth hand, and be completely wrong.


David G

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