Security - was Invisible Windows

[GaryT]

On 28/06/13 22:21, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Friday 28 June 2013 07:47:08 GaryT did opine:
>
>> Help :-)

[snip]

> And this has happened in the past too?  Either you have been hacked, wipe
> that drive clean & reinstall, or that mouse hates you, replace it.
>
> In fact, I would not only do both of those, I would also order me a Buffalo
> Netfinity router, and install dd-wrt on it as insurance against being
> hacked again.  That is the best kept secret to home security, essentially
> like having a loaded 12 gauge shotgun leaning against the front doors
> inside frame.  And both write down, and set, an alphanumeric password at
> least 24 characters long.  Few hackers will even think of trying to guess
> the password since at 5 guesses a second, they will be century's doing it.
>
> There are a couple rootkit snoopers extant, but neither seems to have been
> updated in at least a year, one is chkrootkit, the other is rkhunter.  But
> rkhunter needs to be installed on a clean machine since it keeps a database
> of the crc's of the important files so it can alert you later.

Gene, how do you avoid the possibility that someone can easily enter 
your machine whilst you are browsing?  When I'm browsing I see a great 
many IP addresses that belong to a wide variety of people and companies. 
Most often advertisers on the web page, but also others.
I use the old FireStarter for that purpose - and can see up to 50 or 70 
different connections at times, dependent upon the Web page I'm visiting.

Always Google, because they are a fixture. They watch everything.
After I removed the hard coded link to Google from FireFox, the Google 
presence seemed to slow a little but they are still there. There is also 
a big server in France that receives a lot of info from my machine any 
time I start FireFox while online. The only way I avoided that was to 
start FireFox BEFORE going online.  But, they are there, it's hard coded 
into the FireFox settings.

Once someone has a connection, called by the web page, they can deposit 
pretty much anything. I use Wireshark to capture all activity and there 
is always a lot of traffic to/from organisations that are part of, or 
have attached themselves to the browsing activity.

What good is a fancy firewall in a very common case like that?
GT