Do you like you’re Ipod, MP3 or PSP?

What would you do if you lost it?
Wait let me guess buy another, I bet I’m right but what if you didn’t need to buy another one.
Let me guess you think I’m lieing, no I’m not darksat reminded me of a website the other day which will help you keep your gadgets safe thanks to the internet.

The internet it’s a amazing thing don’t you think, well the internet contains IP addresses and these give away your location which can be very precise so whats this got to do with my MP3 player well in fact it has a lot if you’re planning on using something called “gadgettheft”.
Thanks to gadget theft it installs a script onto you’re portable console or music player so that when someone “installs the drivers” their information is sent to you from their ISP to their computer name, so you want your Ipod back give the information to the police and they will go to the ISP and get their address and ta-da you could have a chance of getting your MP3 player back.

The World of Social Engineering

Well my attention has been drawn to social engineering, and to be really honest its amazing, I’m currently reading “The Art Of Deception – Kevin D. Mitnick” and it shows you many of examples how social engineering is used and its really shocking that it really is that easy you have to be fast on your feet though keep the chatter going if your calling someone down the phone, but it really is quite scary how far social engineering can get you if you want some information, the book has brilliant stories in it check it out.

Social engineering well you must of heard of conning people will its basically that just incase you’re interested, now if you run some kind of company you need to realize the dangers of people, now let me guess you have firewalls anti-virus’ installed the lot, WHO CARES, yeah your protected from attacks from the internet, but what if someone asks you for your password?
“Hello this is ********”
“Oh hi can I have your password”
“NO!”
This isn’t what I mean not exactly that easy the social engineer will make up a load of crap about why they need someone’s password and you might even believe them.
Can you stop this?
Sure its called a company policy you tell people not to give out any information without you (the owner of the company) having agreed
So as long as you’ve read up on Social Engineering then you’re prepared for the worst.

The dangers of war drivers.

Okay there is a lot of people out their using Wireless access points because their so easy thanks to Microsoft, but are they really safe you might have asked yourself before purchasing one of these in my opinion nothing can beat wired networking in your own house, but you might have a laptop and want to move around well then I would say you do need wireless.
So what security issues does wireless face?
Simple a lot you might of heard of these so called war drivers, these people drive around in their car trying to pick up wireless signals especially unsecured ones once they’ve done this they will begin to sniff your ‘traffic’ passing through your wireless connection this means everything you’re doing is being logged into their computers so lets use a example, your looking at a shopping site like amazon.com while your shopping the war driver is logging things like pages you visit to your login details, once they’ve done that it is possible to do things like change your delivery address then you wont get your stuff and someone else might get it, this can be a pain when you get your bill and find that you’ve lost thousands of pounds, because of one person and their laptop.

Blocking Websites or IP addresses

Their can be many reasons to block websites from your computer such as you want to keep kids from going onto malicious sites or you just want to stop yourself going onto sites, for me I blocked a bunch of shopping websites so I don’t spend any money such as ebuyer.com, play.com and amazon.co.uk.

To block the websites I used something called the host file you will find this in “%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\” for XP machines for other machines you might need to look for it.

To open the file you can double click on it and open it in notepad you will get examples in it showing you how to use it but some people don’t always understand it.

Once inside it you can type in at the bottom of the page “127.0.0.1 example.com” the 127.0.0.1 is your local machine which you are on right now and example.com is the site that you want to block from your machine, so try it out and you will find that the list slowly gets bigger and bigger.

Security on our PC’s

Who doesn’t have any security on their PC’s?

If you don’t you have to be mad or you just want as much spyware as possible, but what security do you use me on one hand now use open source/freeware software for security as its all free :D. But I don’t think I need any more stuff, I used to be overloaded with security software until I started exploring the world of viruses and spyware now I haven’t had a virus, malware or anything like that in a couple of years now, why? Because I know how it works.

All I run now is Avast! Home Edition, Zone Alarm (which I think is crap) and anything that accesses the internet is put in a sandbox I rarely let any program actually access the internet if I look in my program control settings their is a lot of red crosses.

Why do I run Avast! Home Edition?