Firewall

[skeeter]

Any way to tell if you have been hacked? My daughter thinks she is being hacked at college probably via LAN. Any firewall software (Free or low cost) she can install? Any firewall stuff work with aol?Thanks for the help. She is using Win98FE.

[Demosthenes]

There are a few nice programs out there for firewalling. I run Hacktracer overlaid with ZoneAlarm on my Wintel machine.

Hacktracer has a neat geographical locator which traces the IP and puts it on the map. It is less verbose than ZoneAlarm, which is why I liked it, but as to its security, I have not the slightest.

ZoneAlarm I got due to the overwhelming adoration people show for it. I think it is an absolute pain in the ass with the WindowsNT kernel since it is always sending information to vague IP address and even itself (127.0.0.1).

Anyway, get ZoneAlarm. It is free, simple to set up on most any Windows setup and effective.

What makes her think she was hacked?

Respectfully,

Demosthenes

[mairving]

Check some of the free tools from Foundstone . They have some things like BOping and others that help in intrusion detection.

[skeeter]

She has aol installed on her machine. While she was at work someone sent a large number of emails to a large number of address from her account. She is upset and wants to find out if and who. Also wants to prevent it in the future.

[Tuf]

It is possible they never touched her system. Since AOL mail is web based all they would need is her password and events such as this are not ucommon on AOL. Did AOL suspend her account and tell her that the email came from her IP Address?
If not about all you can do is get her a POP3 email address and discontinue email from her account. Or better yet discontinue AOL. If she changes her password it may solve the problem but the way AOL works there will always be issues with security.

[TimPoet]

Originally posted by skeeter She has aol installed on her machine. While she was at work someone sent a large number of emails to a large number of address from her account. She is upset and wants to find out if and who. Also wants to prevent it in the future.

Any chance that was a virus? Is her system acting screwy since this event? And were the emails pornography related?
I had a client on AOL who was told by AOL customer service one day that the day before their conversation her email account sent out about 1000 emails in 5 minutes and her friends who were on her email addy list reported back to her that they got porn email from her AOL email acct addy.
She kept saying she had been hacked (but she knows little about tech stuff and said her computer was full of errors immediately after), so I figured she got a virus. Since she had no AV, I had her get her HDD reformatted and OS reinstalled and her computing life's been beautiful ever since....
If only life was so simple....
Hey, where could I go for a reformat to get rid of all my corruption? Hmmmm.

[Tuf]

" Hey, where could I go for a reformat to get rid of all my corruption? Hmmmm."

Isn't that what prison is for?...LOL

[Jenni]

It's possible that someone is sending out emails with her email address as the return address. It's fairly easy to spoof a return address. My brother has sent me mail from my address before. Just to prove that it could be done.