How do you know if you have been hacked?

[Deagle]

See topic and thanx:)

[Budfred]

If your browser is acting weird, you run Hijack This, Spybot and/or AdAware and a deep antivirus scan to see if you turn anything up. However, your best bet is to make sure that you are running a firewall so that you will see and prevent hacking attempts. If you want to get hacked, run a wireless broadband connection that is always on and don't use a firewall or any other security precautions.

[Deagle]

Well of course I don't want to get hack, that would be really dumb of me:) The reason that I'm asking is because my Zonealarm said there have been X number of intrusions have been made and X number of those have been high rated. Now I don't know what it means but I'm concern because its feel like hacker is targeting my comp:D
Thanx and oh how do I see the list of all those attempts?:)
BTW, what do you mean by the browser acting weird?

[mjc]

Nope...that is just ZA doing its job. Most of what you are seeing is either P2P traffic, automated attacks by worms or just ZA being a little too sensitive (and not really doing a good job explainging what is going on).

[kayofcircles]

I am not entirely sure how to tell if IE is acting "weird" either. On my puter, IE has acted weird..sometimes opens a new window for link, other times won't...from the beginning. Sometimes when saving my link list, it closes the draft..other times, it doesn't...??? Really need to check out Opera...:)

What I think you're asking about a list..on the Alerts page of ZA, it shows the path to the log..if you're keeping one. I was gonna clean mine out..just for reducing clutter..yesterday, but couldn't find it until turned on ZA this morning and got the path. Is in Windows/Internet Logs/ZALog.txt.

[Budfred]

The browser acting weird would include things like opening pages out of the blue, the cursor going wild without your control, lots of activity shown on the connection icon even though you are doing nothing or any other behavior that it doesn't normally do when it is freshly installed on a clean system. Some erratic behavior seems to be built in to most browsers, but if someone has taken over it will get even more erratic.

[mjc]

Other "hacked" behavior...

CD tray openning and closing on its own.

Large chunks of drive space "disappearing".

Very slow Internet access.

Large unexplained charges on your credit cards.

People at you favorite forums getting very mad at you, or even getting banned from said forums/chatrooms, etc.

Strange messages appearing at boot up...things like 0wn3d, You can't do that, U will not get rid of me that easy (no these guys can't spell very well, nor is grammar a strong point)

[kayofcircles]

I would alter the "Very slow Internet access" slightly to read, "if you had faster connection speed, and have lost it" because some of us have been peddling our tricycles since the get go. If I get 28,something bps, it's like a rare and unusual thing. Normal is 26,400 bps and it is definitely the phone lines out here in the boonies because my husband took the work puter (in town) online with our ISP connection and got somewhere in the 50's...sob!

[mjc]

Kay, do you have Caller ID or Call Waiting?

If you don't you may want to think about adding one of them. IF your lines are so bad that one of those add-on services won't work, the phone company must fix it so you could get it, which should then improve your internet connection speed.

Also slow is relative....if you have broadband and end up with speeds that are in the slow dialup range then you are most likely hacked. Most hackers wouldn't try to take over a slow dialup machine, but automated worms wouldn't care.

[Ghost_Hacker]

Strange messages appearing at boot up...things like 0wn3d, You can't do that, U will not get rid of me that easy (no these guys can't spell very well, nor is grammar a strong point)



LOL :D :D

Here's some links to Zonealarm log "readers" in case anyone needs them.

Zonelog (http://zonelog.co.uk)

Visualzone (http://visualize.phenominet.com/visualzone/visualzone.htm)

[kayofcircles]

Thanks, mjc, for the thought. We do have Caller ID, and once (before we were online), the IDs stopped working. The phone company kept insisting that it was the ID box, and I kept saying that two different ID boxes, in two different rooms, on two different surge protectors wouldn't go "out" simultaneously. After several phone calls, they sent a guy out and he discovered that the construction crew had split lines in the box down the road..thereby depriving our line of some of its "juice." My current problem..this morning am at 21,600 bps..is my ISP, but they won't admit it so we're thinking of changing ISPs. We just can't afford satellite comfortably..plus I am still unsure as to whether a dish on the roof in our WINDS is a good idea.