[ILUG] Fwd: Modem hijacking information from UTV Internet

[Aidan Delaney]

On Mon, 2004-10-25 at 11:10 +0100, Conor Daly wrote:
> >From the sound of this, it is, once again, an MS Windows only problem.
> The basis of the hijack is that an autodialler is installed on your system
> or your internet settings are permanently changed by such a website so
> presumably my diald connect script or your wvdial.conf won't be changed...  
I've not heard of any Linux users affected by this.  It would be
particularly difficult on Linux as one would have to find a security
hole that provided (essentially) a shell account to the system.  If such
a hole was found and used, malware would then have to change your
settings and this is a distribution dependant thing.  Writing such a
piece of malware would be very non-trivial.

I think the Windows problem is that it has a concept of trust.  For
example it might trust your local network, or microsoft.com.
Unfortunatly this trust system is technically flawed.  On Linux the
trust system is "trust no-one" :)  There is simply no need to trust the
local network more than the general Internet.

On a very serious side note:  Do the Microsoft calculations for total
cost of ownership include billing for the time Comreg have spent on
this?  Or the cost of Eircom+Esat+BigTelco blocking calls to Pacific
Island destinations?  I know this statement is funny, but I'm actually
serious.

-- 
Aidan Delaney   email: adelaney at cs.may.ie
                web:   http://www.cs.may.ie/~adelaney
                gpg:   http://www.cs.may.ie/~adelaney/public_key.asc
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