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Pastimes : The Justa & Lars Honors Bob Brinker Investment Club -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Math Junkie who wrote (13758)	5/15/2000 12:50:00 AM
From: Gary Taylor	Respond to of 15132

OT, but important! Don't get a false sense of security because you have a dynamic IP address. My ADSL provides me a static address, and I run a personal firewall (Zone Labs' Zone Alarm, which I found while visiting Steve Gibson's site). I discovered that I am pinged and probed quite regularly, thus the firewall. On several occasions recently when my DSL was down, I reverted to dial-up, and was surprised to find as many or more probes of the "dynamic" address than on my static. When you dial up, you will inherit connections to or from sites associated with the previous user that haven't timed out yet. If that previous user visited any cracker sites (absolutely guaranteed to go onto their "to probe" list) then you're hit in addition to just being in a general ip range they probe. Port scanners on a decent pc with a fast internet connection can scan 30,000 ports per minute. That doesn't make me feel very secure just because I have a dynamic address. How long do you stay online at a time? Bottom line, run a personal firewall. I recommend Zone Alarm, and it's free. It will also alert you to any applications on your pc that want to talk to the net, like a Trojan that you didn't know was installed. Be careful out there. zonelabs.com grc.com