The World Wide Web (www) has radically changed our lives over the past few years. Today we cannot think of living without the internet. All of us use the Internet for some reason or the other. Like everything else Internet has its bad and good points. One of the scariest feature of the Internet is the fact that someone could hack into our computers and take all our important data and probably even change it. To keep pace with the hackers software experts have devised various programmes that prevent and block out any attempts to hack into our systems. Firewalls are the most commonly used features to prevent any unauthorised attempts to access our systems. All of us think that if we have a firewall we are safe from any hacking attempts. Think Again!!
Firewalls may not always be protecting your computer from viruses and moreover some of them actually leak out our data out into the world wide web!! https://grc.com checks how secure and safe out firewalls are using a leaktest programme. Its a small programme that one can download from this site (it takes hardly 3 minutes).Once you are connected to the internet , you can run the programme and the firewall will be ''pinged'' and the site will check if any data is being leaked out without our permission.The entire test takes hardly 5 minutes and the results are displayed immediately. what about those people who do not have firewalls protecting their systems?? Are they easy targets to hackers on the internet?
We all know that the Windows networking technology that connects us to the internet could offer out data to the world at any moment. This site has another programme called Shields Up which tests how safe our computer is on the internet. They have a special programme called IP Agent. This agent is important as the site has to know what computer it has to test. The ShieldsUP! tests depend upon accurately determining your computer's Internet Protocol (IP) address. If your IP address is incorrectly determined the wrong machine will be mistakenly tested. In addition, computers with multiple network connections — like a modem and a network adapter — can have more than one IP address. And machines with only one IP address can have it effectively ''hidden'' or ''masqueraded'' if the connection passes through any sort of firewall, proxy server, or other buffering agent. IP Agent easily manages all such complications. It determines your machine's current IP address — or addresses — then contacts this ShieldsUP! website for you. If your machine had a single IP address you'll be taken right to the main ShieldsUP! page. If more than one IP address was found you'll be able to choose among the available addresses. IP Agent is a 20k size programme and quickly downloads on your machine. The server computer of Shields Up probes our computer and tests all our shields and ports. Shields UP! attempts to contact the Hidden Internet Server within your PC.
I learnt at this site that our own personal computer sometimes functions as an Internet Server with neither our knowledge nor our permission. And that it may be serving up all or many of our personal files for reading, writing, modification and even deletion by anyone, anywhere, on the Internet!. The site then displays the results immeditately telling us if our computer is actually leaking out all our information or working in stealth mode. Stealth mode is the safest and it means that our computer deliberately chooses not to respond to any port connection attempts. It even checks out machines NetBIOS internal working and tells us if our PC is exposing its internal working on the internet to everybody. Port Probe attempts to establish standard TCP/IP (Internet) connections on a handful of standard, well-known, and often vulnerable Internet service ports on our computer. This is done from the grc server and successful connections demonstrate which of our ports are ''open'' and actively soliciting connections from passing Internet port scanners. FTP, POP3, Finger, Telnet, NetBIOS, IMAP, SMTP, HTTP are all checked and the site tells us if our computer is open, close or stealth. This is really a site that one should visit and see for ourselves.
I am not a computer or software expert so my review may not be clear to everybody but I did take the tests on this site and my computer works on stealth mode so its secure. Of course ZoneAlarm had a big role to play in this. Check out this cool site today!!
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