Welcome to the Wonderful World of Internet Paranoia! After having a "worm"
zip right past my antivirus program last Fall and start chewing up my hard
drive, I am now trying to be very-y-y careful.
Since I hooked up to cable broadband several months ago, my cable modem
goes through my router first (hardware firewall) before my PC. Then I
have a software firewall on the PC. Further, I now scan all my emails on my
ISP's server before I download them to my computer. How's that for
paranoia? The only email I really trust is from TechNet because Keach and the
IPC folks do a good job of screening. Some of these hackers out there are really
smart.
Oh, by the way, a lot of those little spyware programs can be cleaned off
your system using Ad-Aware from lavasoft.com. It's freeware and does a really
decent job of finding those little "unknown" spy programs (not cookies) that get
downloaded to your machine without your knowledge.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2003 9:59 AM
Subject: [TN] Quickbooks and Big
Brother
Hi everyone,
I was working near my laptop yesterday when I
noticed the "in use" light on my telephone line 2 was on. As I was looking at
it, it went off and I wondered what exactly just happened?
I discovered a sub-program in
Quickbooks called QBDAgent that had executed a call through the modem
without "asking me"! I looked it up using Yahoo and read commentary from
several IT types that this program "phone's home" to report itself to it's
makers, apparently to impede software piracy. There is a .log file associated
that records it's activities which can only be accessed by turning off the
QBDAgent executable via ctl/alt/del. The only way to de-activate the
.exe is to use a firewall or pull the modem plug.
I'm not a particularly paranoid type, but it
unnerves me that my accounting software is under someone else's control!
Any comments or suggestions are
encouraged.
Regards,
Ed Popielarski
QTA Machine
10 Mc Laren, Ste
D
Irvine, Ca. 92618
Phone:949-581-6601
Fax: 949-581-2448
Cel:
949-337-2578
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