Re: How to stop "phone-home" activity? -- PCTECH

Sounds like you want to look at IPCop. It is a linux firewall, combine
that with DansGaurdian and you can block the "adult sites" and those
gaming sites.

Also using Firefox or Mozilla might help in taking away the chance of
a website taking control of your site.

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 16:39:42 -0400, Dan Bale <dbale@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Thanks everyone!
> 
> I feel so much better about my router/firewall setup now!
> 
> But I'd still like to address "phone-home" activities.  I tell the family
> units that use the home PC to behave while online and, while I believe their
> intentions are always good, the boys tend to find sites related to Game Boys
> and Playstation and Pokemon and Digimon that throw back a lot of junk.
> Before the HW firewall was added, one of these sites became the
> non-benevolent dictator of our browser's home page -- even after we changed
> the settings, it didn't stick.  (I think SpyBot S&D finally got rid of it.)
> 
> For this reason, I still have my guard up, even though you guys have
> convinced me about the HW firewall capabilities.
> 
> Since I do a lot of financial activity online, I try to be extremely
> cautious.  Surprisingly, one of the web sites I visit a lot allows logging
> in from an unsecure page.  While not directly financial-related in nature,
> it gets into personal info that I'd prefer to treat just as I would my
> financial matters.  (I get to a secured login page by entering in a bogus ID
> & PW on the unsecured one.)  My current bank requires a login ID of my
> social security number, which drives me bonkers!
> 
> So, one of the features that I was thinking a software firewall would offer
> is the ability to monitor all outbound traffic.  And stop & interrogate the
> traffic that I didn't recognize as something I initiated.
> 
> Jim Franz mentioned "I use Zone Alarm Pro and have no problem w/Live Update.
> But I set it to where I have to approve every connection."  Doesn't this get
> to be time-consuming?  And how easy/difficult is it to identify the
> application that is sending and/or the data that is sent?
> 
> John Jones mentions that his software firewall "detects when an
> application's EXE
> file has changed and forces me to re-authorize it for 'net access."  Might I
> ask which firewall app does this?
> 
> The other consideration I have is performance.  This is a 233MHz CPU with
> 128MB of RAM, running Win98SE.
> 
> BTW, the reason I don't completely trust detectors for keyloggers and their
> ilk is that they only recognize them by known signatures.  If there was a
> way to trap the behavior of keyloggers in general, I'd be interested.
> 
> tia,
> db
> 
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-- 
Mike Wills
iSeries Programmer/Lawson Administrator
koldark@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.koldark.net
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