How much danger from intrusions is there?
I frequently hear from people the statement “There’s nothing on the system that anybody would want anyway”. I walk them through various scenarios, such as simple ones if they’ve ever paid for anything on-line with a credit card or if they have any financial records or social security number on their personal machine. More importantly, there is the issue of legal liability. You are potentially liable for damages caused by a hacker using your machine. You must be able to prove to a court that you took “reasonable” measures to defend yourself from hackers. For example, consider if you put a machine on a fast link (cable modem or DSL) and left administrator/root accounts open with no password. Then if a hacker breaks into that machine, then uses that machine to break into a bank, you may be held liable because you did not take the most obvious measures in securing the machine. There is a good paper http://www.cert.org/research/JHThesis/Start.html by John D. Howard that discusses how much h
