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SECURITY CAMERAS FOR YOUR PC
There are several services which are appearing on the Internet which will collect the firewall logs from individual users, collate the data from all the reporting sources, and then "tell on" those users doing the nefarious activities by reporting their activities to the ISPs hosting their accounts. If you read the service agreements you "signed" once you signed onto an ISP, you will see that you are not supposed to do nefarious things like scan your fellow Internet neighbors. Firewalls generally will save all these attempts in a log that you can peruse at your leisure.
www.mynetwatchman.com is one site which performs this service for free. You download a client which runs on your PC and collects the firewall logs and forwards them on to this site. Now..... you might ask. This is a free service, right? And you want me to download some software from this guy? How do I know I am not downloading spyware and trojans. You are exactly right of course. All I can say is you need to be careful. I can vouch for the integrity of the mynetwatchman software. At this writing, the mynetwatchman client has been integrated into zonealarm.
One of the best places to learn about things like this is on the Internet newsgroups. See the section on enabling your newsgroup for a list of very useful newsgroup sites. "News.grc.com" has some great newsgroups discussing all kinds of security software, hardware, etc.
www.d-shield.com is another site that provides intrusion detecting reporting, although I haven't investigated it.
The new McAfee Personal Firewall Plus 4 includes the capability to report the intrusion attempt to hackerwatch.org.
I expect this instrusion reporting/detecting/monitoring service to be a very big thing in the future. It seems to be one of the only tools we have in cyberspace to protect ourselves, and proactively monitor the terrorists! As of March 2003, Mynetwatchman software is actually incorporated in the newer versions of zonealarm! Check it out. I feel this approach to detecting/dealing with crackers will be the preferred approach!
I feel there will be four important pieces of software running in the background which will go a long ways in the future to securing our Internet, and insure safe computing. These are the antivirus programs, the antispyware programs, the firewall programs, and the intrusion detection reporting programs. At the present these programs are not integrated together, they are provided by different vendors, and especially not integrated with the OS. They will be. Count on it. I wish I were a lot younger and I could make my fortune in this field!
The success of IPv6 could probably be insured if these techniques could be integrated with the TCP IPv6 stack! There is still time, since IPv6 has not been very widely adopted yet.