Shades of FV's Nathaniel Borenstein: Carnivore's "Magic Lantern"

pasward at big.uwaterloo.ca pasward at big.uwaterloo.ca
Wed Nov 21 17:09:38 EST 2001


Jay D. Dyson writes:
 > On Wed, 21 Nov 2001 pasward at big.uwaterloo.ca wrote:
 > 
 > > > Everyone remember First Virtual's Nat Borenstein's "major discovery"
 > > > of the keyboard logger?
 > > > 
 > > > 'Magic Lantern' part of new 'Enhanced Carnivore Project'
 > > 
 > > In the same vein, but a different application, does anyone know what the
 > > state of the art is for detecting such tampering?  In particular, when
 > > sitting at a PC doing banking, is there any mechanism by which a user
 > > can know that the PC is not corrupted with such a key logger?  The last
 > > time I checked, there was nothing other than the various anti-virus
 > > software. 
 > 
 > 	As much as this will sound like a panacean suggestion, I'd say the
 > best way to avoid being a victim of this sort of attack is to dump Windows
 > and utilize Linux (or Solaris x86) with a GUI front end.  With the advance
 > of *nix GUIs and the advent of utility suites such as Sun Microsystems'
 > Star Office, I've long since abandoned any justification to continue using
 > the Microsoft Windows operating system and office-oriented applications.
 > 
 > 	Yet another reason why Open Source is your friend.

I did not mean to imply that I am running some variety of windows.  I
am interested in the technical problem of what is the state of the art
for detecting whether or not a computer has been tampered with.  The
use of some version of un*x does not per se solve this.



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