[Pc_Support] Intruder in my machine --- someplace

[Phil Barnett]

On Tuesday 29 November 2005 11:16 am, Homer Whittaker wrote:
> Phil Barnett wrote:
> > Did you ever use that credit card at a restaurant? That's by far the #1
> > place that your credit card number will be lifted.
>
> Of course.  However, the Fraud Department of my Credit Card company
> picked it up and the charges all seem to be from one identifiable use on
> my machine.
>
> Are you saying that it is doubtfull that someone is lurking on my
> machine?  If so that surely makes my day :)
> Homer Whittaker

It's pretty unlikely that there is rogue software or sniffer software running 
on Linux. I haven't heard of anything in the wild doing that.

Without computer forensics doing a complete analysis, there is no way to know.

On the other hand, there are dozens of ways that people can trick you into 
becoming an unwitting accomplice.

If the one identifiable use on your machine was a credit card purchase, the 
vector to the bad guys might be at your machine, between you and the 
identifiable use and all the way into their infrastructure. If it's on their 
end, the most likely culprit is a rogue employee doing bad things with their 
data stream.

Another common exploit is for someone to play a man in the middle attack on 
you. You may think you are going to a real corporate site but you actually 
have a machine in the middle relaying between you and the real site. They get 
to steal everything that plays through the data stream.

Unfortunately, we don't work/play in a secure environment. Computers and 
networks were really not designed to be trustable first and everything else 
second. In fact, security has been trailing computer technology for as long 
as I can remember.

-- 
"In communism, man exploits man. In capitalism, it's the other way around."