Protecting Sensative Information on your Computer

If you keep "sensitive" information on your pc, I highly recommend doing at least one of the following things:

1. Disconnecting your internet when you are not using it, or are away from your computer

2. Turning off your computer when you're not using it/ hibernating it.

3. Disconnecting your computer from the wall, aka: power sources.

#3 would be best, but #2 is good, #1 is definitely necessary.

Now, under normal circumstances, i would say that #2, simply turning off your computer will work. But here are 2 reasons why I feel #3 may be necessary:

1. I was recently reading an article about computers in japan. They were talking about how they had learned to run the internet, and information, straight through power cords, at around (I think it was) 20 megabits. If that's true, I don't see why they wouldn't use to run information in and out of your computer.

2. Recently, I've been having weird problems w/ my computer. It'll be all the way off, then, in the middle of the night, I'll wake up and it'll be on. And in every single situation, I'm certain I didn't leave it on. That really worries me.
It started doing this 2 wks ago, and since the 3rd time I've been cutting off the power, I forgot last night.

I'm not terribly worried about them seeing anything on that computer, especially since I have nothing of value on that computer anyway, but the point is: I could have. And now I'd be screwed.

If they have the ability to turn a computer on and off, and suck info out of it, there is no real way to protect information on it. I'm hoping that I'm wrong, but...

Another problem most people arent aware of, unless you use a program like boot and nuke to completely erase your hard drive, people can sneek in spyware into your system before you even buy it. They simply add lines of code to blocks of your hard drive, and your operating system detects them as bad blocks of memory, and doesn't use them. So you have hidden spaces on your drive that are security risks, and can allow hackers and spyware in.

Any questions??

Just one thing. If there is malicious code on the computer BEFORE you buy it, do aftermarket spyware programs (i.e. norton internet security) even detect these programs or code, or do they simply ignore them?

_________________
Tom 'The Decider'

No. I'm told, that by the way that they enter the code, it's probably not possible to be detected. What it does is tell the computer that that specific block of storage space on the drive is bad, so the computer ignores it. So the spyware detector doesn't even see it. I'm thinking it's likely that most hard drives have it built in as a trap door. That way they have easy access. But it's impossible to tell whether it's only done to specific computers, or if it's a standard thing.

I'll bet that a tool like dban's Boot and Nuke will wipe it out though. I hope so anyway, other than going through the hard drive sector by sector, I can't think of any other way to get rid of it.

Perhaps someone will/has written a special program to address this issue.

Thanks. Good info, but disturbing. Much like most of the info that I've found recently.

_________________
Tom 'The Decider'

http://sectools.org/

	Pat wrote:
	http://sectools.org/

Be careful of that site. I've been there before to get software. Out of the 3 that I downloaded, 2 were viruses. So don't open anything you haven't virus scanned.

Some open-source software will give false positives... I've used alot of them with good results,you can find this software elsewhere too. I've done just simple netstat -a in command prompt followed with whois with surprising results. Most of my internet traffic goes through Pittsburgh for some reason.