peer guardian connections

December 30, 2005 2:22 PM

I use peer guardian to keep an eye on what tries to connect to my computer, should I worries about these...?

Things like globix corporation and limelight network have tried to connect to my computer repeatidly, and I blocked it. Are these and others attacks, or more passive invasions into my computer?

posted by chuckforthought.com to computers & internet (10 answers total)

What are they trying to do?
posted by delmoi at 2:23 PM on December 30, 2005

Are you running antispyware software?

Are you behind a firewall?
posted by k8t at 2:32 PM on December 30, 2005

I got hammered by some Italian government agency for an hour straight once, thousands of attempts.

Globix corporation is a huge network and data management corporation.

Limelight networks is also a huge corporation of some sort.

For those two, I'd guess passive. What else are you getting hit by?
posted by Derive the Hamiltonian of... at 2:40 PM on December 30, 2005

just run a normal firewall (good ones would be tiny or outpost) and don't use peerguardian and similar things unless they have a purpose for you
posted by suni at 2:42 PM on December 30, 2005

If you're running any sort of peer to peer software, you're going to get a zillion false positives with PeerGuardian. It's all noise, no signal.
posted by I Love Tacos at 2:52 PM on December 30, 2005

@Derive yeah i looked those two up, but i was wondering if anyone knew more, maybe why theyd be trying me

ive also seen nextweb, and tons of universities both foriegn and domestic. things like 'time warner communications orlando' could also be their isp service not them, the corporation.
posted by chuckforthought.com at 3:07 PM on December 30, 2005

The thing about peergaurdian is that if you use their complete list you'll be blocking an amazing number of ranges - everything government, large corporations, etc...

Those two might be trying you because you are visiting sites they manage.

If you want peergaurdian to protect your music downloading habits or some other specific application, you don't need all those ranges. Those guys at methlabs.org are quite paranoid.
posted by Derive the Hamiltonian of... at 3:23 PM on December 30, 2005

Be careful of the assumption that if the attacking computer belongs to an organization, that organization is targeting you. It's at least as likely that the attacking computer has been compromised, and is mindlessly attacking a wide variety of other computers in the hopes of similarly compromising them (taking them over).

Sadly, it's not uncommon for a hacker/cracker to have control of tens of thousands of computers (bot networks).

And generally it's pointless to let the organization know of the problem; if they cared (that is, had allocated enough staff and other resources to be able to handle such problems), they'd have a set of measures in place to prevent and/or detect such instances.
posted by WestCoaster at 4:01 PM on December 30, 2005

And generally it's pointless to let the organization know of the problem; if they cared (that is, had allocated enough staff and other resources to be able to handle such problems), they'd have a set of measures in place to prevent and/or detect such instances.

I disagree. There's certainly no harm in sending an e-mail to abuse@..., and there is a certain amount of benefit. To use a PHB term, it's about "mindshare." If a company's IT department gets called on it enough, it may become a priority in their mind to reduce the number of compromised computers.
posted by arrhn at 7:53 PM on December 30, 2005

Do you IRC? Limelight operates an EFNet IRC server that will scan for open proxies.
posted by devilsbrigade at 9:52 PM on December 30, 2005