Post by alisterPost by BobsterPost by braI have zero IT knowledge. On a political group I expressed a strong
opinion, and straight away another poster told me to die [plus the
usual obscentities], and printed my local "provider/host" name and
address etc, for all to see.
Am I at any kind of risk?
No.
I riled some nasty racist types some years back. They tried the usual
stuff - which basically amounts to a number of differing ways of
saying that I am gay. Then they said they'd tracked me down and
would start off by revealing the suburb in which I lived. They
thought this would scare me off less they got down to street level.
They were out by 20km. They picked up the address of my ISP.
Tonight, if you worked inside my ISP and had access to data from
their cell masts, you could probably get down to my street and which
end of it, but some charlie reading your posts on Usenet is not
going to be able to do that.
There is a small risk if you have your router poorly configured that
they could access your home network but this would require you to
have done one or more of the following
1) enabled remote maintenance on your router (some have this on by
default so it is worth checking).
More OT while we're on the subject.
Speaking of... Last year I was having trouble with my 'landline' (it's VOIP
through my fibre termination / router). It was causing the internet
connection to drop. Each time I called my ISPs helldesk I spoke to a
different flow-chart reader, half of whom were 'going to call me back'. Then
one day I noticed that the phone wasn't working at all so called them and
did the usual dance...
Turns out a setting had been altered in my router (suppied by the ISP) and I
was blamed for it - much to my annoyance. After that call was over I checked
the router settings and it'd been set back to factory defaults then a few
other changes made (the port-forwarding that I'd set up no longer worked).
That's when I realised there was a 'back door' into the damn thing so I
disabled it. I'd already changed the login and password as soon as i
connected to it but it seems that wasn't enough. Bastards never did
apologise to me for all of the fucking around and blaming me for it....
There's a lesson there. I didn't realise that was possible and thought I was
'locked down' (a little knowledge and all that) so good on ya for telling
folks about this.
--
Shaun.
"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy
little classification in the DSM*."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1)
(*Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)
Post by alister2) set-up port forwarding to one of your computers (say as a web server)
3) configured a service on your computer that can be exploited.
in any case you would be at no more risk from this bozo & would
probably already have been infected by numerous other scumbags on the
net
The bozo you are dealing with almost certainly has nothing but the
basic network knowledge & is simply trying to scare you (the same
tactic is used by various sites to scare you into downloading there
fake "Anti- malware apps, don't fall for it), if he genuinely was
capable of more he probably would already have done so.