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Do others have acces to my computer?

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by pbgerrard 2 views

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I am on a LAN at my college. I use the standard windows home networking tool. Today I found a number of things on my computer that ihave never seen:
1.) A shortcut to BJ Printer. Along with start menu icons for BJ printer and BJ monitor. I have not messed with printer settings in a while.
2.) A bunch of icons for folders on the network. With titles like Movies on so and so's computer, and music on his computer. I don't know where these folders came from; i have not accessed any shared folder with subfolders having those names.
3.) I have an old version of limewire, which shortly after starting up closes itself. (This probably has nothing to do with it.)

Does someone have free reign on my computer; how do i prevent them from having this, and how can i stay lofgged off the network (while not having to unplug my ethernet cable)?

9 replies

by aaron h.

This simple answer is that probably Yes, someone can access your computer. The easiest method for protecting depends on the version, but a firewall is always involved. If you have WinXP look into enabling its built in firewall features. If not, looka copy of Norton Personal Firewall, BlackIce Defender, or Zone Alarm. There are many others and most are very good. As a simple protective measure, ensure that File and Print Sharing is disabled on your system. Make sure your antivirus is current and actually running. Take a look at the netstat command and see if there are any strange connections on the machine. Fport from FoundStone (www.foundstone.com) is also very good for this.

by gigelul

If you give us some details like what OS you use, network enviroment domain or pear to pear you can receive more details/solutions.

by pbgerrard

I do not know anything for sure, but I think the network consists of a bunch of computers all connected to 1 hub that gives them acces to a t1 internet connection.

by infosecmgr

If you are using windows 9x someone would have to have installed a back door to do this kind of thing, unless you have a personal web server or other server software running on it. Make sure your antivirus is up to date and make sure all the security patches for your OS and applications are up to date. Especially those related to your browser and mail client.

by meganetcomputers

The biggest this you will want to turn off if you have active is file and printer sharing. In most cases this will stop anyting from connecting to your computer unless they have already placed a backdoor into your computer. This would give them access to everything depending on what kind it is.

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