TLAnews Web service looks at your computer's Private Files

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17.7.2000 Security: Web service looks at your computer's Private Files
Designed to find music and movies Scour a search engine seeks out--without some owners' knowledge--all multimedia data on unsecured hard drives.

En français: Un service web regarde vos fichiers privés sur votre PC
Scour est un service sur Internet qui permet aux utilisateurs d'accèder à une multitude d'enregistrements audio et video. Pour alimenter cette gigantesque base de données Scour n'hésite pas à scanner les disques durs des PC personnels connectés par une liaison haute vitesse à Internet.

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Users are allowed to peer at any kind of multimedia file stored on many personal computers--sometimes without the owners' knowledge, when using Scour's search engine, a popular Internet service that locates digital music and vidéo files.

Millions of users are eager to tap into what the company defines as the biggest collections of digital entertainment.

Users can access any photograph, sound recording or video clip that Scour found stored on tens of millions of PCs. This search engine is may be going to far, since some of these multimedia files can be grabed because many consumeers do not know that they areletting anyone look into their machines while they are connected to Internet.

It is legal, to use that technique said Scour's attorney. But many connected users, notably with fixed connections from home, do not have a firewall to protect their PCs. This makes Scour one-stop shopping for a list of computers that are easy to break into.

Most people cannot configure a secure Internet connection, and it is wrong to think that all people are giving their permissions for Scour to do this.

On your connected PCs do you have confidential information, financial documents ? Scour can just grab those documents to.

An estimation of 20% of all U.S. households that own computers have opened parts of their computers hard disks and have high speed links. Research prediction estimate that 600 million PCs worldwide will be networked by 2003.

If you want to know what other share on their PC's just use http://www.scour.com.

If scour could do this, other companies and other "Users" can also do it.

Résumé en français

De plus en plus de PCs sont connectés en permanence à Internet en utilisant des modems-câble, des liaisons de type xDSL ou aDSL. Bien souvent l'utilisateur n'est pas capable de configurer une connection sécurisée, ce qui selon une estimation americaine conduit 20 % de ces ordinateurs personnels à partager leurs disques durs sur Internet avec "les autres".

Selon une estimation d'ici en 2003 nous seront quelques 600 million de PC interconnectés de cette manière dans le monde.

Si vous partager une imprimante ou un disque il y a de fortes chances que votre disque dur soit accessible depuis Internet.

Ceci est du au protocole SMB utilisé par les machines travaillants avec un système d'exploitatation de Microsoft.

Ces techiques de recherche sur des disques personnels sont proches de celles utilisées par des pirates. Scour n'a pas demandé la permission des utilisaterus pour avoir un oeil sur leurs informations.

Si scour a pu le faire d'autres entreprises, d'autres "utilisateurs" peuvent aussi le faire.

Avez-vous des informations confidentielles, des informations financières sur vos PCs?

Si vous souhaitez savoir qui partage ses disques et ce que l'on peut y trouver http://www.scour.com.

Pour se protèger de nouveau produits font leurs apparition, ils se nomment "firewall personnel" et leurs prix correspondent à ceux d'un anti-virus. Ils est important d'éviter de partager ses disques lorsqu'on est connectés à Internet et d'avoir mis en place la protection par mot de passe.

It all started innocently enough in 1997, years before file-swapping programs such as Napster let college students electronically share their music collections.

Tucked inside the UCLA dorms, Rodrigues and four fellow UCLA computer-science majors combined their student research projects and built a search engine that hunted for multimedia files. The software looked for things that were cool and fun, whether it was movies or music or art.

They went further than any other search engine. They also send bots to scan for multimedia files stored on any machine that uses a computer protocol called Server Message Block, or SMB.

Most home and corporate networks with computers using Windows rely on SMB. If you are using the file or printer-sharing features in Windows, then you are using SMB.

SMB was the way students in the UCLA dorm rooms could share computer files with each other and they added their PCs to Scour's small but growing list of machines to search.

Slowly Scour expanded from machines on the campus to machines on the Internet.

How to protect

Do not share drives over Internet

Install personnal firewalls

Add password protected access if you really need to share same drives.

Scour's searching via the SMB protocol does not ask people for permission to look.

more security information with TLAnews ...

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Revised: juillet 18, 2000 .

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