both my servers crashed

[Ron Davis]

On Sat, 23 Apr 2005 10:25:27 -0400, "Roger Dingledine" <arma at mit.edu>
said:
> > After the first Windows error message, I rebooted and found the
> > installer exe of the backdoor program FTPCentre.13.A on my system (
> > http://www.megasecurity.org/trojans/f/ftpcenter/Ftpcenter1.3.html ). 
> > 
> > I suspect that the instability of the system somehow opened it to an
> > intruder.
> 
> Hm, this is disturbing. My first thought is that this is related to the
> insecurity of your Windows and nothing to do with Tor. Do you have any
> reason to believe otherwise?

No, not really. However, fact is that I'm behind a router with a
hardware firewall and on the pc itself is a software firewall which
won't allow much apart from Tor. I'm running this setup for about two
years now and never before had a trojan or a virus. 

I'm quite sure that the intruder only managed to copy the FTPCentre.13.A
installer exe to my pc. It didn't install and there were no signs that
the exe had unpacked or dropped its files into the Win directories. I
haven't noticed any further damage to the pc. 

That said, it's obvious that Win98 is far from an ideal platform for a
Tor server (or any server). After about 8-12 hours of running Tor, from
the sluggish response of the OS you notice that it has come close to its
limits. Time to exit Tor or reboot.

A week ago I managed to install FreeBSD on another pc. I hope that I
will get Tor running from that box soon.

Cheers,
Ron
-- 
  Ron Davis
  ron_davis at ftml.net