________ SWAT MAGAZINE ISSUE TWENTY-FOUR DECEMBER 1999 ________ / \______________________________________________/ \ / Simple ways to "secure" a Win95 box \ / By -=The Firestarter=- \ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- If your like me, then you'll be use to the odd attack of paranoia, whether this is due to you breaching the security of a server or (like me) your just like that at times :-) So i'd like to describe the numerous ways in which i like to make myself feel nice and safe by encrypting stuff, protecting my Win95 box (which is the only thing i can seem to get online- Mandrake seems to freeze everytime it connects to the net) from a number of things including virus's, trojans, outside attacks, physical access, prying eyes etc. Ok first off Virus's and Trojans, best way to protect against these would be virus scanners, but it's worth bearing in mind that even though a mate of mine had the most up to date version of Norton Anti virus, Win95.CIH still killed his hard drive, so what's my point? Norton is crap. I use two virus checkers myself, since i've never seen a single anti-virus (no matter how up to date it is) stop all of the virus's out there, so i use InoculateIT PE and F-Prot for DOS, ok so what's the reason behind this? well they are both free for a start and one is for DOS while the other for Windows. DOS virus scanners will be able to disinfect files like explorer.exe (where Norton seems to fail - well it did when i checked it last) which are used by windows and DOS scanners are usually a lot faster. I use Inoculate PE when ever my computer isn't doing anything. As for Trojans, well i use The Cleaner, most virus scanners can find a lot of the trojans out there, but The Cleaner comes out best when its down to specific trojan cleaning your after. Next up outside attacks, well ok not many people can get into Win95 boxes from the outside without the use of a trojan, but it is however possible to nuke the box, which is a tad annoying to say the least. Ok best way to protect against this is a Firewall, i recomment Conseal since it seems to offer the best protection as well as being highly configurable, just be warned that it's a real basdard to set up if you don't know how. NukeNabber is also fairly good if you just want to protect against certain ports, i wouldn't bother going to all of the trouble of those programs that block specific trojan ports and send text that says "You have been caught trying to hack this box with BO, we have your IP" first off all you've done is ping the specific port and as far as i'm aware that isn't hacking (then again niether is using a trojan, but i won't get into that) and you can't get busted for pinging a port no matter what anyone says, but i'm getting side tracked on that, anyhow go for something like NukeNabber if you just want to watch ports, because if something sends out 100 bytes of text each time somebody pings a port with a few bytes, you easily have your bandwidth taken up by some guy on a cable connection flooding that port. Oh yeah just a little tip that i find amusing, most lamers that try to connect to boxes with trojans often have trojans on there own boxes, so if you happen to find one, just format there hard drive, yeah i know it's lame, but it's fun and it keeps them off the net for a while. Physical Access, to me anyway, means people actually using the computer to any extent. So somebody sitting at your box doing god knows what to it is kind of unsettleing. So we have ways of stopping people doing that. First off is passwords, a BIOS password will keep people out to an extent, but anyone who knows the first thing about BIOS passwords knows how to get around them, whether it's by a backdoor password or resetting the BIOS via the motherboard. So how about we tweak a few options in Win95 to allow us to add our own options, well rather than go on and on about fiddling with files and such like, just search the net for "TweakU" and grab a copy of that, you'll be able to alter a few options in windows that'll not only make it run faster but give us the option to add out own security features, my personal favorite is to turn off the option to press F8 (or whatever it is) and have the option to go thought the Autoexec.bat file loading each line at a time. The reason i like this is because you can add lines to the autoexec.bat file to load your own custom program, i usually use a simple program written in QBasic that prompts you for a password, something like this: --cut-- 10 print "Enter password:" 20 input $pass 30 if $pass = "letmein" then goto end 40 if $pass = "" then goto 10 50 end --cut-- yeah i know that it's simple, but it's a start. Then there's other programs out there that restrict access to parts of Win95, you can always use them. But at the end of the day Windows security is total shite and can be bypassed by a 4 year old. Which is why we turn to Encryption... I use PGP and PGPDisk to hide away all of the sensitive data that i have, whether it's a list of CC numbers, passwd files from numerous computer systems or just private e-mails sent to me. A good idea is to create a PGP disk of 600mb and on occation back it up onto CD (if you own a CD burner that is). I don't really have to go on about encryption all that much since i'm sure that you all ready know about it and it's uses. Next up is data deletion. Well you can delete all of that data that you stole from some company but it's no good if the government decide to take a peek at your hard drive with either software recovery tools or hardware recovery tools. So you need to make sure that the data is well and truly deleated. For this i recommend East-Tec Eraser. You have the option to wipe files, specify direcories that you often wipe and just cleanse them every so often (windows temp, recent files links and internet cache amoung others). You can also clean up the free space and file slack with it. The good thing is that you can specify how you wipe data, you can use normal wipe with a single pass of zeros, right the way up to "Stop hardware recovery" and wipe the living shit out of the free space/files on your hard drive with about 7 or 8 passes, or best of all you can specify your own wipe method to your own standards. Well i hope that this has proved to be of some use to you all. If your looking for any of the tools described in here, search the net for them!