Computer Users - Protect Your Personal Privacy

Imagine being able to monitor and intercept data from any PC in the world anytime you want. Then DIRT's for you! DIRT stands for Data Interception by Remote Transmission, and if Codex Data Systems in Bardonia, New York has anything to say about it, will become the next law enforcement tool to help stop the bad guys.

The cops are having a really hard time dealing with cybercrime, and they all put on-line child pornography at the top of the list because of the emotional response to it. Suspected terrorists, drug traffickers, money launderers, are also potential targets for DIRT as are various criminal organizations which employ anonymity, remote control and encryption to hide themselves. DIRT represents a fabulous, but questionably legal/ethical means of information gathering by intelligence agencies as well as private investigators. Thus Frank Jones and Codex Data Systems begat DIRT. "We have to give law enforcement the tools they need to get real criminals. So many of them are now using encryption, DIRT allows law enforcement to read encrypted messages."

DIRT operates surreptitiously like a Trojan Horse. It is transmitted secretly to a target via email in several ways: either as a proprietary protocol, self extracting executable, dummy segment fault, hidden ZIP file, application specific weakness, macro, a steganographic attachment or other methods the company's technical wizard, Eric Schneider will not divulge. Once the DIRT-Bug is successfully embedded in the target machine (your personal computer), two things occur. One, all keystrokes at the keyboard are secretly captured and when the target machine is connected on-line, it will stealthily transmit the captured contents to a remotely located DIRT-Control Central for analysis. This is how encryption keys are to be discovered and later used to develop evidence in criminal cases.

Secondly, when the target is on-line, his PC will invisibly behave like an anonymous FTP server, giving the folks at DIRT-Control Center 100% access to all resources. So much for privacy! Dave Banisar, Staff Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC. said DIRT "Sounds like something the Stasi would have developed." The problem is enforcement and abuse he points out."The only way to control this technology is after the fact, during the trial when the police have to show how they obtained evidence." When Dirt was first demonstrated in New York, the obvious queston was "What if this gets out to the entire Internet community, what will happen if we no longer trust our email?"

The vast majority of computer crime goes unrecognized, unreported and unprosecuted. Despite the fact that the use of DIRT or a DIRT-like clone developed by the computer underground violates the Computer Abuse Act of 1984 and an assortment of other laws, the ability to control it remains extremely slim. And the uses for DIRT-like software stagger the imagination. All that someone with DIRT needs to know is your email address. Period. All he has to do is send you an email, with the embedded DIRT-Trojan Horse and he's home free, and you are a clueless victim.

Large organizations usually worry about hackers breaking and entering their networks. Now they have reason to worry that DIRT-Bugs could invade their networks as well; whether launched by an investigating law enforcement authority, international competitors or spies, or just hackers. The last thing in the world they want is for critical workstations to be broadcasting passwords, encryption codes and providing complete system access to whoever controls DIRT-Central.

Unfortunately, most firms have little implementation of the minor preventative policies they have developed. Thus, defending against DIRT can be difficult. However, organizations which utilize NAT and proxies in their firewalls achieve some degree of confidence that DIRT's remote access capability will not function. Just the keyboard strokes (and associated private information) will be broadcast to DIRT-Central.

According to the developers at Codex Data Systems, if you are a solitary PC sitting on a dial-up or a cable modem, there is nothing today you can do except don't click on your email attachments. Of course, ignoring email from strangers is always a good idea. But, if I were a cop or a bad guy using DIRT, I would certainly go after your home PC as well as the one at work. It's a whole lot easier, and I am going to learn just as much.

With the advent of more and more powerful Trojans, such as DIRT (which only occupies 20K), the threat to our networked systems gets clearer and clearer. As Frank Jones, the inventor says, "There are no more secrets with DIRT."

Fortunately, Frank Jones is only partly correct. DIRT and other illegal and intrusive programs can generally only work successfully on target PCs running unprotected versions of Windows etc. With a few free modifications available on the web, most of the bad guys can be held at bay. For DIRT to work at all it must first gain access to your PC, then much more importantly for the hacker, transmit information back to the snooping government agency.

Your first priority therefore is to stop DIRT and its pals from gaining easy access to your personal computer. By far the easiest route into your PC is via two inbuilt Windows features called "Outlook Express" and "MSN Messenger", which have more holes in them than large blocks of Swiss cheese. Only a certifiable cretin needs either, so go to "Control Panel", select "Add/Remove Programs". Next, highlight "Outlook Express" and hit "Remove". Repeat this sequence with MSN Messenger.

From now on you will have to send and receive emails the "hard" way. Resist the temptation to use free email facilities offered by your local internet service provider (the company you pay to dial into the internet). Many local ISPs, including several in Australia and Canada for example, are extremely vulnerable to government "suggestion" and "persuasion". Bypass your local ISP completely and get a Yahoo or Hotmail email account. Both are free and once you have your chosen username and password, the email address is yours for life. To open a Yahoo account or to open a Hotmail account Yahoo is the more reliable of the two.

Now you have to prevent Trojans like DIRT actually entering your PC, for which you need a device called a "firewall". At the time of writing the best firewall in the business just happens to be free for personal use, so the next step is to download and install a copy. of ZoneAlarm 2.1 44, written by by Zone Labs. The web address is http://www.zonelabs.com/download.htm, or you can link direct to the download page by clicking here. When prompted by the download site, select "save file to disk", then when your computer directory appears, save in "desktop". Once the program has downloaded, double-click the ZoneAlarm icon on your desktop, and the firewall will install automatically.

The most important function of a firewall is not preventing Trojans from getting into your PC, but preventing them from getting out with your private and personal data. Zone Alarm is very good at this, and once the firewall is installed, every attempt to transfer data out of your PC will be brought to your immediate attention by a prominent flag on the monitor, asking you "Yes" or "No" to proceed. If in doubt always click "No".

By now clever folk will already be muttering "Yes, but what if a Trojan Horse or two was already inside my computer before I installed the firewall?" A very good question, to which there is an immediate and free answer. Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation has free soft- ware programs for detecting and automatically removing all existing "Spyware" Trojans from your PC. What you need to do is download his "Opt Out" program, which you can do by clicking here. Once installed, Opt Out will scan your hard drive and (with your permission) remove any and all resident Trojans permanently.

Once you have finished these chores you will have an active and highly effective defense against government (and other) intruders. Very nice, but you do need to check the integrity of your firewall from time to time. Once again Steve Gibson comes to the rescue, with a free program designed to to exactly that. His "IP Agent" will check your exact position in cyberspace, then comprehensively test your firewall. To download IP Agent click here.

That should do it for now, but be advised my sub-heading "Temporary Solution" was meant to be exactly that. Sooner or later government snoopers will catch up with Zone Labs and Gibson Research technology, meaning an update of your defenses may become necessary a week or month from now. Following the above procedures and using the free software cannot provide an ironclad guarantee that government snoopers will not one day hack into your PC, but used in combination they do make government's job incredibly difficult. Because bureaucratic hackers prefer to pick on highly vulnerable people, your array of defenses may well convince them that trying to attack you personally is not worth the time and effort