Crashed!?!

[Turmoil]

Hey Guys,

I am a subscriber to Tech Tv!!! It rox! NOw, on this chan there is a show called "CyberCrime" Some of you may be familiar with it.. Its pretty good... and it talks about security stuph in general....
Anyway... To the point.... I was watching the show, and they had a guest hacker on it.. He was doin demonstrations for the importance of firewalls ....To make a long story short.... He got into a comp that wasn't protected and he changed the Desktop wallpaper (What a crime!!!) :P and then to make sure that the user saw it... He crashed the system.. so that it re-booted to show the new wallpaper...

I was wondering... How can I avoid gettin my sys crashed??? How is it done??? Is there any other way than just a firewall???

Thanks for your input

[instronics]

Hi turmoil.

I presume that your talking about a windows system. A firewall is indeed a way to avoid certain types of system crashes. But its not enough to keep a system really safe. I would advise you to always be upto date on any patches available, aswell as having an upto date antivirus installed. Maybe a program like adaware might help you. (www.moosoft.com) Maybe this post will also help you understand a bit how computers can be attacked:

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...tack+scenarios

That will give you a description of how attacks can cause damage to a computer. You have to try to secure your system in a way, that even if your firewall fails, it could still stand against certain types of attacks. Find out what parts of the system or applications can be crashed and how, then try to update these weak points. If you have any more specific questions, let me know and i will see what i can do.

Cheers.

[black_death]

DOS attack:
http://www.macconext.com/Dos%20Attack%20Part%201.htm
http://www.macconext.com/dos.htm
http://acksyn.kerneled.com/art_dos_attack.htm
http://www.igknighttec.com/Articles/...k/basicdos.php

those who use dos,ddos are not hackers they are f@ckin lammaz

[|The|Specialist]

Sounds like he got FTP then made a picture then saved it as the same file-name as the picture on the other PC then switched pictures so that when it reboots windows will find that file and open it only its a different image inside.

As for crashing... heck it doesn't take much to do that. You can entask the wrong programs, open missing or corrupted files or files on corrupted disks, compile & run programs with bad code, fill a batch file with a whole page full of garbage then open it, or you can sometimes even DoS a PC to a point where it can crash. Sure it helps to have a FW but for those run of the mill crashes that comes from programs you bought then it also helps to look at what the programs' requirements are such as mem, ram, OS type and (ect)