virus's and spyware... something to be said for macs.

g5 · Post by g5 » Mon Dec 04, 2006 7:06 pm

Hey.

I switched to Mac in 2003 and never looked back. My girlfriend, however, as a run of the mill Acer laptop with XP home. What a nightmare it has been trying to keep it from getting infected. Time to reinstall Windows on the bloody thing... Mac has made me lazy, but now I'm back to spending hours trying to keep her computer from trojan's and all this shite. When is windows going to get itself together and build something even remotely secure?

200hr Wonder · Post by **200hr Wonder** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 8:56 pm

AH g5, you are wrong in saying that Macs are more secure than a Windows machine. The fact of the matter is that Windows has many thousand times more crackers and virus writers attacking it. Now don't get me wrong, I am not saying that OS-X is insecure garbage, it is a fine operating system. The reason Windows sees so many viruses is because of popularity. If I wanted to create a bot not I am going to do it on windows just because of the number of install bases. Plain and simple. There will always be vulnerabilities in software, it just takes man hours to find them. The number of man hours being put into windows is magnitudes higher than OS-X or Linux or BSD

I am a Linux fan FYI

Cheers,

Wonder

PeteThePilot · Post by **PeteThePilot** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 3:33 am

The reason why "Windows has many thousand times more crackers and virus writers attacking it" is because of its inherent security flaws. Not because so many people have access to it.

If you have an OS (and associated software) that is vulnerable, do you think it is going to matter whether 5 people or 5 million people use it? The weakest link will always be exposed.

200hr Wonder · Post by **200hr Wonder** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 11:56 am

Pete I disagree... hackers try and accomplish something... usually taking over as many systems as they can, ergo they choose windows.

Louis · Post by **Louis** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 3:41 pm

I remember reading a few articles talking about how Windows had fundamental flaws in its design making it difficult to secure compared to *nix and Mac OS. Mostly had to do with the registry and with the way services are run.

I had written much of a nice reply and somehow managed to do a key combo that not only refreshed the reply page, but also cleared my unsent entry... (And I have *no* idea how I did it, I never clocked myself, but type pretty fast.)

I found another post of mine on roughly this topic and decided to expand on it:

-Reinstall Windows XP

-Install the programs you typically use (ex: Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, Java, Flash, Winamp, MSN Messenger, etc) I would for all purposes ditch Internet Explorer and Outlook Express if you haven't already done so.

-Set them all the way you like them, with all your usual tweaks and whatnot.

-Make a backup image with a program like Norton Ghost. Ideally, DVD-Rs, otherwise an external USB hard drive or many CD-Rs.

-Keep up to date data backups.
There are different ways to do this: DVD-Rs/CD-Rs is one.

I know its pricier, but my favorite would be to take a pair or trio of external USB 2.0 hard drives, used in rotation, with an automated nightly backup setup (can be as simple as a batch file run with with the Task Scheduler, or as fancy as specialized software capable of tracking file modifications and updating only what has been changed) with the freshest copy kept off-site, in case of disaster. (Update: Microsoft SyncToy is a pretty interesting utility I found since writing these lines, and its free too.)

The next time your computer crashes, instead of a couple of hours worth of work or a bill from someone else, pop in the images and your box should be up and running in about 15-20 minutes (maybe less). Here would be a good time to update the programs you had on your image and create a new, up to date one. Put your data backups back on your hard drive and you're good to go.

One place that'll give you plenty of information to work with would be http://www.radified.com There's an excellent guide on Ghost and another one explains a backup strategy specifically with laptops in mind.

*** Update ***
Radified's guide is still a good read, but I have to add a warning. I found out the hard way that Ghost 2003 and earlier versions, running under DOS, offer sketchy compatibility with Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives common in later machines.

Ghost32 version 8, which runs under Windows, and the "hot-imaging" capable 9 and 10 don't have those issues. Also, you might want to look into using something like BartPE, Reatogo or Ultimate Boot CD for Windows to create and recover your images. (Note: Single optical drive systems will need to either make the OS load entirely into RAM or backup on something else than CD/DVD-R).
*** End of update ***

Good luck, let us know how it goes, and feel free to ask any other questions here.

Louis

LostinRotation · Post by **LostinRotation** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 11:10 am

I'm going to have to do another XP install soon myself due to registry and virus issues. It's a pretty big pain in the ass due to all the drivers and other crap I need to get tweaked out components to work together, but....I would rather build my own computer and upgrade what I need at will, then having a disposable computer any time my computers video card can't run the games or proggies I want. I love the concept of the mac, but I won't touch one until I can build it myself and upgrade components when I want to.

-=0=LiR=0=-

200hr Wonder · Post by **200hr Wonder** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 12:03 pm

Better yet Louis... run a firewall, use a RAID 0 or RAID 5 array and you should never crash. I have my home PC setup behind an old Celeron 433 that I setup as a firewall and have my drives in a various RAID configurations. The end result is I have been running for two years on the same XP install and it is solid as a rock. I do back up to my file server on a regular basis just in case

I do like your external HDD enclosure idea, actually I have had it set up at an Architecture firm for a few years and it works like a charm the only issue being when they ask to pull a file from backup that was two weeks old, your retention is only 48 or 72 hours. Though a monthly DVD-R update would be good depending on your storage size.

As for firewall, do your self a favour dust off the old PIII that is collecting dust and install IPCop in it. Easy to install easy to manage even if you do not know a lot about computers. http://www.ipcop.org

Cheers,

Wonder

Louis · Post by **Louis** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 1:10 pm

Thanks for the reminder 200 (How the hell could I forget about RAID!?)

I too prefer to maintain the installations in shape and hardly, if ever, reformat. (One computer here is well into its third year on the same install)

Already have a hardware NAT router that does a decent job as a firewall, plus software firewalls on all computers (ZoneAlarm) as well.

Goodbye,

Louis

200hr Wonder · Post by **200hr Wonder** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 3:02 pm

The problems I have found with the hardware NAT router is that there DNS is stupid, especially for internal routing, and you can not do fun stuff like cash windows updates to lesson your download requirements, Open VPN, Site to Site connections with VPN, traffic shaping, multiple internal subnets with different access policies, transparent proxy all sorts of stuff you can with a real firewall.

. . · Post by **. .** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 5:18 pm

200hr Wonder wrote:Pete I disagree... hackers try and accomplish something... usually taking over as many systems as they can, ergo they choose windows.

Anyone with real skills doesn't want to 0wn some crummy cable box running win98. The guys with real skills try and find remote vuln's on the more secure OS's. Not only will it provide them with bragging rights, but it you'll get some pretty interesting machines running stuff like open bsd, or bsdi, etc.

FL410 · Post by **FL410** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 7:48 pm

I find it hard to believe that an OBSD or FBSD box would be rooted, unless it was running a vulnerable or improperly configured service, used weak passwords etc.

. . · Post by **. .** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 8:36 pm

dude, those boxes (fbsd, obsd, bsdi, etc etc etc) get owned all the time. It's not your average script kiddie mass scanning B classes that does it. All those vulns that get posted on bugtrack have often been in the wild for a long time.

PeteThePilot · Post by **PeteThePilot** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 5:40 am

Ok geeks time for bed.

I have both a PC and a MAC. MAC works flawlessly all the time and the PC gives me ulcers. It's as simple as that. I have Norton AV/FW on the PC and it works like a charm.

Dust Devil · Post by **Dust Devil** » Sat Dec 09, 2006 10:04 pm

I laugh when people think that macs are more secure because it's "coded better". Windows gets hacked more simply because of the more bang for your buck theory. This is the case for all developers be it legit or not. Why is there more legit software made for windows? because there is more users plain and simple. Same goes for virus and spyware developers.

PeteThePilot · Post by **PeteThePilot** » Sun Dec 10, 2006 7:05 am

Suddenly the lack of orthodontic coverage in our benefits package has a horrifying ramification.....

cyyz · Post by **cyyz** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 12:28 pm

If you guys stopped downloading the porno, you'd stop having issues....

cloudcounter · Post by **cloudcounter** » Mon Jan 08, 2007 9:37 pm

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/security ... ttack.html

I run xpro [ experimental]
cc

Brewguy · Post by **Brewguy** » Tue Jan 09, 2007 7:20 am

cloudcounter wrote:http://blog.washingtonpost.com/security ... ttack.html

I run xpro [ experimental]
cc

Hey, that's a great article!
...... unfortunatly, that vunerability was in PHP, not Mac or Linux. Any windows based machine running any sort of PHP based app. was just as vunerable.

Here's another article for your amusement:
PCMag.com: 4 Reasons to Dump Linux

Zagarino · Post by **Zagarino** » Thu Mar 01, 2007 8:55 am

how lame can windows get ...

GO LINUX !