The Problem with Broadband

[bonkers325]

By 2003, the broadband home penetration rate will increase to 46% of all online households. Not only is this music to the ears of broadband service providers (as the cost of high-speed access can exceed $50 per month per household), it presents 'crackers' (malicious hackers) with a golden opportunity to penetrate millions of unsuspecting PCs.

When a user goes online, the internet service provider assigns the PC with an IP address so that any data requested from a website can be delivered back to the PC. Users are given a new IP address each time they log on; broadband users are "always on" and are often assigned a fixed IP address.

Link

 

[Chatterjee]

never heard of a company "Inetl"

-S

 

[themadmonk]

Invest in a good firewall.

 

[Tippy]

Yo Bonkers,

Did you read about that broadband tidbit over at 8wire.com? They had some stuff over there. That place has some hardcore networking chat going on in their forums.

Tips

 

[R0b0tN1k]

I don't see it as a threat. The last machine a cracker wants to get into is some doofus' home system. The only way it could be used as an advantage is when doing a DDOS attack, but even then a dinky DSL or cable line wouldn't help the cause very much and it would take lots of time and effort to get enough of these low-bandwidth sytems to launch an attack. It is a good idea to keep script kiddies out with a simple, free software firewall.