Home Computer Talk

Gmail has been hacked and the capcha program subverted. What is a capcha program? You’ve seen them, when you try to sign up for a site and they ask you to type in some numbers displayed as a picture or against some background pattern.

The idea of it is to make sure you’re a human.

They do this to capture ‘bots’ – programs that try to log in to sites to get access to user information and accounts. Gmail has had their spam numbers double already, so if you have a gmail account and you’ve been seeing more adult spam recently, that’s why.

But it brings up the question of how safe we are on our home PC’s. We rely heavily on the ISP (Internet Service Provider) to block our systems from unwanted contacts. They run a program known as a Firewall; it stands on the Internet side of their connection and watches what comes in. Mostly it only lets in legitimate packets of information but the hackers are very sneaky and sometimes the nasties come through.

Windows XP, Service Pack 2 comes with a firewall built in, but it’s pretty basic. Hackers have long since worked out ways to get around it unless the home user configures it to work better.

Mr JM’s work will not allow their users to be Administrators on the computers they use; this means a lot of the programs that try to reach into your computer and install themselves simply do not have the permissions needed to do it.

But most computer users have no idea how vulnerable they are because they don’t really understand how computers work, nor have much idea about how computers connect to the Internet, nor even about why Microsoft and other companies keep releasing updates.

Are you safe? You may very well think so, but those in the know realize that probably eighty percent of the computers in homes are wide open to fraudulent use. People who know what is going on can find and take your private data, watch what you do online or even hijack your internet connection so you pay for their downloads.

In the next post, I’m going to pass on some of the tips Mr JM told me about how a wide open computer can easily be made more secure.