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When and Where Is the Hunting Best? What if you plan to ambush some hapless hackers and nobody comes? Yes, life sucks when it is boring. Here's how to find happy hunting grounds. Are you operating on a LAN inside a big organization? Chances are they have a pretty good firewall. Or, you may be on a virtual private network or connect to the Internet through a proxy. The good news is that most hackers won't even know you exist. The bad news is, no bad guys will give you a chance to, heh, heh, play with them. So your first step is to get a home account through a typical security-unconscious Internet provider. Nowadays DSL and cable providers attract hackers like garbage attracts bears. American Online is also pretty good. Many of its high population of teen users, alas, have bought the media propaganda that you can prove you are a genius by breaking into a computer. My own experience is that I get fewer attacks against my account on a small, high-quality local Internet provider than when I'm online with Earthlink. My hunch is that the bad guys get online with one of these megaproviders. Then, knowing that home users rarely fight back, they systematically attack all the dialup numbers in their geographic region. By contrast, wannabe computer criminals have to guess at random among the billions of possible Internet addresses to uncover dialup numbers from the smaller providers. As for time - do you like to get online at odd hours? I get the most attacks from genuine bad guys from about 11PM through 5AM or so. This brings up a lot of attackers from Europe and Asia, for whom these are prime time evening hours. I'm guessing that if you live in Europe or Asia, you will discover lots of attacks from North American hackers at 11PM through 5AM your local time, as the seriously bad guys will be counting on you being asleep. |
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