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(For background on this post see my previous post: Hair raising
experience)
I had Black Ice, the intruder protection software installed on my
system since Dec 5 th. For some reason Listen Only Squawk suddenly
showed up as a constant attack on my system Dec 13th Monday morning
near the opening bell. Sadly for me I didn't know it was them until I
figured it out just after the market closed today and didn't trade
these last two days because of it. I had not run the LOS
program/reciever since Friday and I wasn't using it Monday or Tuesday.
The intruder's ISP was in Colorado. They are of course forbidden
from revealing anything about the identity of their users. On the
second day of conversations with the ISP (I am located in Sarasota
Florida with a different ISP) he let it drop that the user was in
Chicago. Since I was no longer staring at the charts until they made
sense, by then I had done a lot of studying about how hackers work.
They try and find a "port weakness". As you make your system more
and more secure you close up more and more ports. One of the last
ones to close is the streaming audio port since this would disable
streaming audio and video. I AM a LOS (Chicago based) customer but
wasn't running the program. But today when the market closed and the
intrusion stopped at about the same time I began to wonder. Since the
hacking had stopped I reconnected my system to the internet and
checked to see if LOS was still transmitting. If they were, then I
could eliminate them as the source. There was no voice but I could
hear the carrier. When I excited LOS I noticed that there was a NEW
intruder alert. I tried it several times and each time I excited LOS
there was a new intruder alert. The hack was no longer constant but
the IP address that showed up each time was the same one as was doing
the continuous attack! If it hadn't slipped out that the intruder's
location was Chicago I would still be pulling my hair out!! It was
quite a scary experience since it looked like some evil hacker's
computer was going to keep hacking me until it figured out how to get
in, run all my accounts into the ground, get all my credit card and
bank account numbers, and send poison email to everyone on my email
list and post all my super duper make me a millionaire quicker than
Wade Cook ELAs to the omega list. Ouch Ouch Ouch.
I called the ISP and told them what I figured out. "Didn't they call
you yet?" was the response I got.
I am so relieved that this was a "heads up you are powerless if it
happens" alert and not the real thing I am not upset with anyone
including my chicken little self. Black ICE has place where I can
label the LOS IP address as "trustworthy" so the alerts won't bounce
me out of my trading chair. I can only guess that this Monday they
started doing something a little bit different then they were doing
last week. If my experience causes you to get a intruder monitor AND
you are a LOS customer, you can use my trick of turning off LOS and
monitoring the time to capture their IP address and let Black Ice know
they are "friendly".
Fred
"Success is the only test of genius" -R.Adm Daniel Gallery 1901-1977
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