If you’re among the lucky few percent of small office/home office users who have “broadband” Internet service (usually defined as a connection that can carry at least 384 kilobits per second from the Internet to you), consider yourself fortunate. You enjoy a level of access that, only a few years ago, was only available to large corporations at a cost of thousands of dollars per month.

Rough Water
But a high speed onramp to the information highway does not necessarily mean smooth sailing for Web surfers. Some of the problems you’ll encounter will be mere annoyances. You may discover that performance is more uneven than before because, while your Net connection is now fast, the connections of many of the websites you access are still often congested or slow enough to cut your browsing speed. But the most serious threat–one that ISPs, telephone companies, and cable companies rarely acknowledge–is that of security breaches.

What would an...

High speed connections also allow unwanted intruders to get in and out faster and try more methods of attack. The high speed connection itself makes you a more tempting target. Even if the attacker isn’t human–that is, if it’s a Trojan horse or worm–it can do far more damage to you and others when it exploits a broadband connection to spread itself.

The pages that follow explain the risks and tell you what you can do to protect yourself, your family, your bank account, and even your reputation from the more frequent and potent security threats encountered in high speed connections to the Net.

Why Me?

If you’re a typical broadband user, your reaction to the statements above might well be, “Why me? There’s nothing much of value on my machine–just the browser I use for the Web, plus my recipes, some letters, and a few household documents. Why would a hacker care about breaking into my system?”

Good questions. What would an intruder hope to gain by breaking into your home or small office computer system?

Chances are, they’re after one or more of the following things:

  • Your bandwidth. With 384 kilobits to more than a megabit per second of bandwidth, your DSL or cable modem is capable of sending and receiving a lot of data very quickly. While it’s unlikely that you give your broadband connection a 24×7 workout, hackers can find lots of things to do with it. For example, your system, together with others that have also been co-opted, can be used to unleash huge barrages of data on other computers on the Internet, rendering them useless. (This is called a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack.)

    Hackers can also use a compromised machine as a jumping-off point for difficult-to-trace attacks on other machines. This is especially likely to occur if you’re using certain vulnerable software, such as older versions of the Wingate connection-sharing software. This software makes the attack appear to come from your machine when, in fact, it’s coming from somewhere else.

  • Your computing resources. If hackers take over your system, they can turn it into an Internet server that does their bidding. They can use it as an illicit “meeting place” by setting it up as an IRC (Internet relay chat) server, or use your hard disk as a repository for illegally copied software (“warez”), movies or music. I’ve personally discovered systems–most often running Microsoft Windows or Windows NT 2000–that have been used to hold gigabytes of illegally copied music, video, and expensive software such as Microsoft Office. If the copyright sleuths that prowl the Internet identify your machine as the source of such materials, your ISP may blame you for the copyright infringement and attempt to cut off your broadband service.

  • Your personal data, your identity, your reputation, and/or the contents of your bank account. Do you prepare your taxes on your computer? Pay your bills using a service such as CheckFree? Have any files at all containing your credit card numbers, Social Security number, or other identifying information? If so, you’re a potential target for identity theft, an increasingly common crime in which a thief gathers sufficient information to impersonate you.

    The havoc that an identity thief can wreak in your life is almost unlimited. He or she can she can change the addresses on bank, credit, and brokerage accounts, diverting statements so you won’t notice that something’s amiss. He can then sign up for credit in your name, sell your investments and pocket the proceeds, and drain your bank accounts. If you have a debit card, the thief can wipe out the account to which it is attached in a single transaction.

    The Fair Credit Billing Act was passed during a very pro-consumer period of US history to protect US citizens from fraudulent charges on credit cards. But debit cards did not exist at the time and, therefore, were not covered. If a thief is operating from afar, especially from a foreign country, you’ll likely have no recourse. If a criminal manufactures false identification with your name on it, you could even find yourself accused of crimes, with warrants issued for your arrest when you have done nothing wrong. Other entities may also collect data about your Web browsing habits or computer usage without your consent–and then offer it for sale to all and sundry.

  • While snooping techniques affect all Internet users regardless of the way they connect, a high speed connection masks their presence by preventing them from taxing your bandwidth.

    In the sections that follow, you’ll learn about some of the most serious Internet threats–and the ways in which a broadband connection can amplify their dangers.