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PsichoDM

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 24, 2006
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I was thinking about putting a little more effort into securing my home network and the relative PCs from the nasties of the outside net, but the problem is that I really have no idea what people can throw at me. Without knowing what kind of exploits and common attack patterns there are out there, there's pretty much no way I can prevent it :)

Hence I was wondering if anybody was aware of a list or collection of popular and common ways that people can exploit vulnerabilities in one's PC (talking mainly Windows in my case) so that I can see if I can improve the security of my machines.
It's ok if it is a bit more detailed and maybe has code snippets, I'd love to mess around with some of that and see if I can maybe test it on my home network.

thx
 
Why not just ask for hacking tools and be done?

Stick your PC behind a firewall, use AV and don't click links you are unsure about. Thats all you really need to know.
 
Well "hacking tools" aren't really a good explanation of the concept or vulnerability they're exploiting. I'm ultimately interested in figuring out how those hacks work as opposed to just having a tool that does it for me.

I guess it'd be nice if there was one that scanned/probed a certain machine and told you what it's currently vulnerable to, so at least you know what you're not supposed to worry about.
 
I didn't type this all up for you, its a boilerplate I've sent a couple of my security aware friends:

There are thousands of totally different ways to attack a PC. There isn't a list of common attack and their defensive plans either. The bad guys are sometimes unbelievably clever, and the internet was never designed to have bad guys working against it. DNS (your ISP) is the biggest target these days, and theres not too much you can do to protect yourself from an infected ISP. Fundamentally, DNS has a root-authority problem. There are various services you can use to check to see if your ISP is keeping its DNS security up to date, but theres new problems all the time.

Windows usually operates on a 1 month security update time-table. Microsoft updates the security of their OS's through an OS update on the 2nd Tuesday of every month (usually). The way it works these days is, the bad guys get a hold of it Tuesday, find whatever was patched by Wednesday, and come up with an exploit by Thursday. If you dont have your machine fully patched by Thursday your in serious trouble.

Once somethings on your network you're pretty well SOL. So keep it off your network. Protecting the computer itself wont do much, most of what you have to worry about your router can* protect you from.

Here are some general things you can do to protect yourself.

www.grc.com
(Gibson Research Corp)
Steven Gibson was (arguably) the first ever anti-spyware programmer.

specifically, use:
shields up! (not sure how long that url remains valid). Run the "all service ports" test. What grc.com is doing is it pings a good load of the common ports of your router to see what your router says back. Worst case it says "how can I help you", meaning its routing incoming traffic which... should only be happening if your severing something, or, better yet, "nothing happening here", which is good because it means no traffic makes it into your network, but a spammer has now confirmed your existence which leads me into the 3rd and best possible outcome, it says nothing. Steven Gibson calls these modes open, closed, and stealth, respectively.

go to your router, turn off UPNP. To get to your routers page, type its internal IP (usually 192.168.XXX.XXX, mines 192.168.1.254, common is 192.168.1.1, or 192.168.255.255). To find that IP out, open up start, run, type in "CMD". type in "IP config". If your in vista, just type in "cmd /k ipconfig" in the search in the startbar. Your gateway IP is probably your routers IP unless you have multiple-DHCP or sub-net-masking going on (good for big networks such as schools). Each routers page is different but increasingly (and alarmingly) they have a technology called Universal Plug-and-play turned on by default. Universal plug-and-play basically allows client systems to alter router settings without the user ever being notified. This is in stark contrast to a routers intended design. Note I've been told some Xbox Live features work out of the box with Upnp, but will require some port forwarding to work properly if its turned off.

If your on a wire-less network, use the WPA or WPA-2 encryption types. WEP has been cracked and can be cracked using cheap equipment in under 10 minutes. A van can pull up beside your house, capture as much information as they want for as long as they want, drive off, decrypt it, and have whatever was sent over that time period after 10 mins of decrypting. The same could technically be done with WPA encrypted traffic but it would take millenia to decrypt.

Finally and most inconveniently, "no-script". Its a plug-in for firefox which doesn't let any script of any kind load on your page without your permission. If your one of those people who's visiting all sorts of new pages all the time, this would be a real pain in the ass. But if you have a list of bookmarks thats 99% of your browsing activity, this might be a good idea.

And of course, strong passwords, everywhere. Standard hashing as a form of encryption is still used very often in all sorts of nooks and crannys. A rainbow table is a table thousands if not tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pre-hashed common passwords. Using a 64byte password protects you from every rainbow table I've ever heard of, but of course, who wants a 64 character (numbers, case sensitive, and using weird keys) long?

and for the love of god dont click any link in any e-mail ever.
 
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