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How to Make the Bad Guys Immediately Miserable
The Internet is the newest Wild West. We won't be able to
send all the bad guys to /dev/null right away. So we owe it to the victims of
cybercrime to make life immediately unrewarding for the bad guys. At least
that's the excuse some of us give for having a little fun.
Geek note: /dev/null is the much
harsher Linux version of the Windows Recyle Bin. People who habitually use Linux
and other Unix-type operating systems like to feel superior to the rest of us by
making allusions to /dev/null.
The scariest thing you can do to a haxor is to run a port scanner against him or
her. It sets off firewalls big time, as shown in Figure 11. The reason for this
is that a port scan is often the first step in breaking into a computer. Of
course we would not do anything so mean to a computer criminal, honest! The
concept is to let your attacker know, within seconds, that someone sophisticated
is watching. In most cases that will shut down the bad guy's attacks on you,
since they are allergic to having their hard drives erased. Not that us white
hat hackers would ever be so mean to a criminal…
Figure 11: Examples of scanner alerts. The screen shot on the left shows the
firewall denying access to a port scan. On the right it shows the firewall
preventing the victim computer from responding to a port scan.
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