[extropy-chat] SPAM: ISPs get serious

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Spike wrote:

>
>
> > Robert J. Bradbury
> > Subject: [extropy-chat] SPAM: ISPs get serious
> >
> > I had it happen to me (my laptop was once hijacked by some hackers
> > in Eastern Europe in an attempt to win some distributed computing
> > contest).  It can happen to you as well...
>
>
> Interesting.  I have been speculating for some time
> that a clever hacker could steal one's idle CPU cycles
> and do it in such a way that it would be nearly
> undetectable, even on a laptop, if they weren't too
> greedy.

My laptop has a feature that when you consume lots of CPU
the fan turns on to get rid of the extra heat -- so its kind
of obvious when my laptop goes from being normally fan-off
(in power saving mode) to fan-on (in heavy CPU-use mode).
Since I normally don't use my laptop (its a very old machine)
for DC activities it was fairly obvious that *something*
strange was going on.  The hackers violated the "too greedy" rule
(fortunately for my education).

After the event -- which was several years ago -- I moved all
of my windows machines behind a firewall.  I don't trust the
security of Microsoft systems as far as I can throw the floppies
(or CDs) they are installed from.

R.