29 October 2013

Police have access to your PC

There is some focus (by the corporate media) on external threats that pose a security risk to your online activities. 

Security treats are real from computer viruses, trojans, keyboard loggers back doors and other vulnerabilities or exploits.

Their consequences are real, from emptied out bank accounts to information ‘stolen’ from the user’s personal computer.

But are hackers and cyber criminals the only worries of our online lives?

Corpau has received information from a source on the strict condition of anonymity, not to divulge the source nor the geographical information of the source, as the implications are feared to effect the families of the concerned providing the information.

Quite simply put, the Australian police ‘force’ has access to your personal computer.

This is done via a remote access application at the police officer’s terminal using the targets public IP address, whether it be static or dynamic.

Briefly, an IP address is a form of identification in a numerical format that identifies your computer on the internet. In simple terms analogous to a street address in a telephone book.

Currently the IP is at version 4 (IPv4) with the numbers represented as  xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, with an example of 10.0.0.138, with a possibility of 4.3 billion addresses.  Since the address space is running out, a new version IP version 6 (IPv6) is being implemented using 128bit instead of IPv4’s 32 bits. This allows the creation of 3.4 x 10^38, or one trillio-trillion-trillion devices to have a unique address. An example of an IPv6 address is 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf.

If your IP address is static, it is the same throughout your connection to the internet irrespective of how many times the router is switched off or rebooted. If you have a dynamic address, the ISP (Internet Service Provider) issues your router or modem with a new public address every time.

The police have access to your PC with the remote application, being able to see and do anything you are able to do on your computer, from reading emails to accessing files.

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