Additional Protection (Software)

[myreality]

Hey guys, you all have helped me out greatly in the past and am now looking for a bit more of your infinite wisdom.

First though i would like to draw attention to the List of Free Apps and Utilities page. I was wondering if Cephius or anyone able could update the front page list of links to useful sites. Some of the sites listed are outdated and or no longer in existence.

As for my question. I am looking for additional protection for my computer such as peer blocker, IP blocker, etc.... Anything that can safeguard my internet connection beyond the usual anti-virus, malware, spyware programs.

Additional tips/tricks that one would not normally know to add to ones PC would be welcomed also.

[orinthia]

Additional protection for protection's sake isn't very smart. Most of it beyond software firewalls, antivirus, and vpn/tunneling services won't do a whole lot, and even some of those mentioned do little to help fix stupid. The first thing is to figure out the reasons you need it so you can find the right things to combat those reasons. Primarily it is fixing stupid habits, but not everyone is aware of or can overcome them.

IP blocking; if you use public trackers (assuming you meant tor rents), no amount of block lists will give you much if any protection. Private trackers do help a bit, but you won't be very protected from your ISP figuring out what you're doing (if they care, most don't unless bugged or you tor rent heavily or stupidly (getting honeypotted)). The main way to safeguard is to rent a seedbox, since it's a remote machine doing all the work for you and then you download directly from it. I only tor rent occasionally, so it's never been an issue. I used to use block lists but stopped caring many years ago. They're still being updated though; just search for them.

[myreality]

Thank you for the information. I was updating my computer and going through the lists of files i no longer needed and i just thought i might be behind the times. I already knew about Peer blocker and such but never knew just how effective they would be. I was curious if any new software recently came out that has yet to become popular which could be added. Through searching around and your answer it seems i cant get much more then this for a basic user.

Luckily for me i do not have to download anything as my roommate currently has a massive DVD collection (still growing) and gives me free reign.

[The Stig]

I highly believe that no matter what you do somewhere something someone is going to track it if they care enough.

If you care really that much, apparently you can jump into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29 if you really must mask yourself but I'm unsure how effective it is.

On the subject of software, this is pretty helpful but requires a rather large intuition:

Spoiler: show

Unless you know your stuff then more software won't hurt, but in a working environment even with the top of the range software that isn't enough to protect from a symptom I commonly described as PICNIC

problem in chair not in computer

Last week a virus got into several laptops. The software didn't stop it. It was spread from 1 person initially it seems, but not sure how.... The payload seems to be:
Get infected (somehow)
Send a rather simple e-mail from themself into your contacts in outlook
This alone flags it as trustworthy
An "invoice" is mailed around with a politely worded e-mail to check it
The invoice is a zip, with a screensaver dumped into it which had its icon changed to a pdf icon (it looks 40% convincing to the trained eye)
Boom

I'm all for installing a few software but there's a point where I'll stop and instead try to educate the user because it becomes moot at that point.

Aside from the software above in the spoiler, the following has seen me past the last 8+ years:

Spyware Blaster - free app that basically pulls a list of blocked sites, cookies and activeX stuff from a database, and blocks them for you on a system level
Microsoft Security Essentials
NoScripts (Firefox)
AdBlock (Google Chrome)

My browsing habit is, I only use Chrome for sites that I know are safe, i.e. amazon, british airways, or my electric provider etc -- everything else is done via noscript

Opinions on software "needed" varies based on user level but the above is my setup in terms of protection. In the odd scenario I do get infected then I bring in:

Adwcleaner:
https://toolslib.net/downloads/viewd.../1-adwcleaner/

^ this has saved many hours of my life fixing other people's stuff. It simply... works. Some occasions I've had to intervene by manually cleaning what it thinks it can't clean, but it works.

Malware Antibytes ... the other go-to software I use to give the PC a quick overview


If you need anything more at this point... just reformat lol

[orinthia]

Modern attacks are either sophisticated enough to go around antivirus/etc, or lowtech enough to social engineer you into infecting yourself and your friends. The middle ground is all but gone in most cases.

I use a couple browsers and a few profiles on each one to contain specific sites and their cookies from each other. For chromium-based browsers (I use chrome and the newer opera), there's ublock and http switchboard for ad and script blocking. Ublock is superior to just about anything else available to chromium-based browsers, while http switchboard is really great at what it does (I believe uMatrix is coming along in this space as well).

For Firefox, there's adblock plus, which is like using a missile to punch in a nail for adblocking, and request policy and noscript for script blocking. Ublock is currently in experimental stages for firefox and is really good right now (much more sane and far faster than abp at doing the same job) if you wish to try, just don't use it with Firefox Nightly ( https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/is...mment-67308172 ). You can use both RP and NS together, but you have to enable each site in both constantly until it's unbroken.

I also use old opera 12.17, because its mouse and keyboard gestures/shortcuts are still very useful for a few things. There's not a lot of plugins in this space, but it at least has ghostery and built in list filtering. Most of the modern web doesn't work well with this browser, so I use it less and less.

IE8+ has built in ad filtering as well in the form of "tracking protection lists" which are available from fanboy's site (the one behind the fanboy adblock lists for abp/ub). Not much else here yet though; have to wait for MS to make the api more open before stuff can get ports. Regardless if you use IE or not, put in a TPL as various other programs may use webpages in their programs (and thusly, IE), and that TPL will help protect you a little from their stupidity.

You may also wish to try portable versions of these browser and lower their privileges down to limited so that they can't make any changes to anything outside. Portable browsers are nice when you switch computers often so you can keep your logins and sessions with you.

[myreality]

As always, thank you for the response. I seriously need to increase my knowledge on just how things work.

[orinthia]

As always, thank you for the response. I seriously need to increase my knowledge on just how things work.

Some curiosity about stuff like this is good; get familiar with the capabilities of things so you can make better informed decisions about what you may or may not need. Instead of VMs, you can use sandboxing software for some protection without a whole other installation of windows. Though, even sandboxes are not perfect. The landscape changes constantly, so keeping that curiosity helps. Occasionally reading up, trying stuff, testing those tools on infected systems, as an amateur, is at least a little fun but I'm just weird.

[Meresgi]

Modern attacks are either sophisticated enough to go around antivirus/etc, or lowtech enough to social engineer you into infecting yourself and your friends. The middle ground is all but gone in most cases.

lol was just about to say the same thing. It's incredibly easy to mask malware to bypass most AV's on the market (I watched a webinar a few months ago that showed how easy it was to bypass Symantec, Kaspersky, McAfee and a few others, and another recently using DNS beacons to bypass SPI and other firewall mechanics).

VMs are a good tactic to use if you're running software you don't know to be legit or not, though you shouldn't be installing it anyways honestly if you are not sure (make sure to get a hash of the legit file to compare to before installing), but you can escape out of a VM into the host OS with certain methods depending on versions and software etc etc.

Best defense as just a regular user is to be aware and cynical of 110% of the things on the internet. Also don't store crucial information on your system, save passwords, use passwords at all (use passphrases or 2FA) and repeat passwords. For security questions, answer them with gibberish and make note of that gibberish somewhere else to reference. (It's very easy to find your facebook/linkedin or whatever and guess security questions. Shit Apple lets you fucking try new questions if you dont like the pair it gives you).

[Sho]

If hackers care enough, they will get at you, regardless of what preemptive protections you have given yourself.

Meresegi has the right of it on good PC/Internet ethics you can follow. You can take this one step further and use a password system such as LastPass or Dashlane. These managers work to not only secure and list out all of your commonly used passwords on a data table, but now feature ways of allowing you to change all of your old passwords (which will most likely be very insecure and/or overly used passwords), tie all of your passwords to one "Master Password" you can write down. The beauty of having a single password should be readily apparent -- since you only have to worry about a single password, you can make all of your individual site passwords as random as fuck (by yourself or built in password generator) to further increase security across the board.