Comments on: Ah Ha!

By: The Rest of the Story | NewMedia On the Go

The Rest of the Story | NewMedia On the Go — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 05:31:35 +0000

[...] I left off in my last posting, I was going to chase down the last vestiges of malware still apparently lurking on Phil’s [...]

By: Katherine W. Prawl

Katherine W. Prawl — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:16:25 +0000

I didn’t really answer your question, Tony. We don’t use a firewall (other thatn our router) specifically, except MacOS. However, the operating system has a built-in firewall, which is turned on. Little Snitch, which I wrote about, does allow one to block traffic to specific IPs, too. But I think we’ve solved that problem now. See my forthcoming post about latest developments.

By: Katherine W. Prawl

Katherine W. Prawl — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:27:33 +0000

Tony, What we had was a Trojan Horse, which relied on social engineering to get itself installed. Phil had to open an infected file, probably a video in an email purporting to be from someone he knows, then he had to enter his admin password to allow the malware to install itself. The “DNS Changer” malware is known to masquerade as a “missing CODEC” for viewing videos, but when it has done its dirtywork, the promised video is still not displayed. A firewall would not protect against that. I remember some weeks ago Phil grumbling about getting a vudro from his friend that he couldn’t see, so I expect that’s what happened. Macs are not prone to massive numbers of viruses, and this is just about the first malware to target this otherwise secure platform. So as long as Phil and I heed this lesson and don’t install stuff we don’t know about, we should be ok without another layer of firewalls.

By: Tony Cornett

Tony Cornett — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:38:34 +0000

Kat,
What firewall do you use besides the router? Most you can block specific IP addresses from outbound traffic as well as inbound. Maybe that would work versus the router “rule”? Trying to catch up with ya here after my arm surgery!