This is an easy attack. As pointed out above, so much so that it's a feature of how the Internet routes traffic. Breaking encryption is not an impossible task, but is dependent on the motivation of the attacker. Buying underwear at your favorite online store generally doesn't expose enough of a monetary incentive to justify the cost of breaking the encryption making the risk low. The military or large corporate monetary transactions can be another matter.

Of course for some of us, working on the "white hat" side can pay for days at the track! Sometime at the track, ask me how I know... :roll: Item #3 here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...e/notable.html

Is there software that can protect you from keystrokers? I'm a computer barbarian and understand little about computers. I have anti virus software and a firewall and run CC Cleaner on a regular basis.

HAHAHA......all this chest thumping! :mrgreen:

Since he's in DC, and I ran into him today:


That being said........NO COMMENT!!

Larry, it sounds like you are off to a good start. The next step is to fashion yourself a hat out of aluminum foil, and make sure you wear it every time you are online shopping or banking, or even just thinking about doing either. :D


It's all about cost/benefit. The cost of shopping and banking online is that someone could get your info, and you'll have to fuch around for a couple months getting your money refunded, cleaning credit reports, etc. The benefit is the time and money you save by performing tasks online. I had my identity 'stolen' about 10 years ago. It was an 'inside job' at Bank of America in Atlanta. All the precautions in the world at my end of things could not have prevented that. So you can unplug from the Internetz, etc., and still have it happen to you.

Oh, and I also had my CC info stolen by a cashier at an auto parts place ~25 years ago. He promptly charged a bunch of car parts for him and his friends. He got busted. I was not charged any $.

It's a risk trade off. Those are a good start, coupled with not storing your passwords on the computer. Don't let the browser save your passwords and I recommend NOT using Internet Explorer (I'm a Firefox fan) and I'm not much of a Windows fan but that's a bit more of a technical challenge for most. This is coming from a Linux machine because from the posts here it's clear that there may be a trust issue. :D

Make sure the anti spam is updated weekly. I use an anti-malware program called Spybot (http://www.safer-networking.org/index2.html) to scan for key loggers. And, it's free as in beer. It's saved me more than once for my neighbors computers who always call me for tech support. ugh. :bang:

I also run a vulnerability scanner that makes sure the patchs have been applied for installed software. Some products are pretty bad at patching. The scanner is here: http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/
Also free as in beer.

Of course the best thing you can do is not surf to sites that are questionable. Or, even better, use a different computer for that. The most common attack points are at the merchant and at the user's computer. The network is a significant level of difficulty higher. Almost all consumer hacking is at these two points.

I've done cyber-security and incident response for a "major" bank since before the Internet. I still shop online and bank online. Just use some caution in giving your info to sites that are not well known. I've never had my identity stolen or my credit card compromised. (Where's the Smilie for knock on wood?) Although, one of my email accounts gets spamed unmercifully.

[QUOTE=BlackTalon;336713]Larry, it sounds like you are off to a good start. The next step is to fashion yourself a hat out of aluminum foil, and make sure you wear it every time you are online shopping or banking, or even just thinking about doing either. :D{QUOTE}

I wear that even when I'm not online. :D

I have the Secuna scanner, use Firefox, and used to have spybot. Think I'll reinstall that. Thanks for the link.

If I don't keep my passwords online in Firefox, I'll forget them all. My memory is getting bad.

[quote=Landjet;336728]what passwords? Oh yea. Try this instead:

http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/

Of course you'll still have to remember one and if you forget it, you're screwed.

This is exactly what I mean by keeping an attitude of "professional paranoia". On the job I'll wear the hat, thank you very much! ;) But off the job, I take it off, and try not to loose too much sleep over anything.

The question about keystroke loggers is a good one. You can never be sure without going to unreasonable extremes that nothing is infesting a computer right now. But as was pointed out, those steps listed are all good ones towards preventing the problem in the first place, or hopefully catching it if/when it happens.

I think good advise for all folks these days, is that if your not computer savvy, that's OK, we can't all be great at everything, but there is still a minimum amount of information you should you know to operate it and part of that is knowing a computer requires routine maintenance to stay in good working order and to stay safe. If you need help, ask friends, relatives, the "good" kids, or last choice is the merchant where you bought it ($$) for help. Routine maintenance should be at least monthly to update the computer's software, Operating System patches, and a full antivirus check.

When you say a full antivirus check every month, what do you mean? I thought that the installed antivirus software is doing that all the time. I have the Avast software and it always alerts me if I arrive on a questionable site and it blocks the bad stuff from entering before I close the connection.

How do you do a monthly antivirus check?

The exact steps depend on which anti-virus software you have. Send me a PM and I'll help you through it if I can. I don't know that brand but they all pretty much the same in how they work.

Basically what I'm suggesting is that regardless of whatever your anti virus is setup to do now (hopefully its setup but you never know sometimes... :) ) is to make sure you know its being used, and to make you aware of the state of your machine by running the anti virus scan manually on all hard disks to get a clean bill of health.

Some will say this is redundant and unnecessary, and it technically is if the program is constantly running and checking everything anyway. But it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling that you know the state of things, and if/when the anti virus is expired or not working correctly, you'll catch that and fix it too.