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paranoidwriter - A PC or Mac can be cracked (us geeky types use "hack" to describe something that's made to work in an unexpected way and is usually a positive thing, wheras "crack" means to gain unathorised entry to a system) over a network, whether that's the internet or your home wireless connection, or even, conceivably-but-not-realistically, Bluetooth or something like that.
It'd be very hard to gain access to a machine that wasn't connected to any network at all. The best you could hope to do was snoop on the data currently being accessed, and even that would be remarkably ropey (really paranoid places like the CIA have such sensetive machines used in rooms with embedded Faraday Cages, but for normal computer use that's the equivalent of a tinfoil beanie).
The two most likely methods of infection are surfing to a malicious web page with a browser whose weakness the page was designed to exploit (normally this means IE, but not always), or opening an email attachment that takes advantage of some weakness in windows, or pretends not to be a program when actually it is (e.g. picture.jpg.exe). It's very unlikely, unless you've aggravated a script kiddie in IRC, that someone would deliberately try and crack your machine specifically. Most attacks work in the same way that spam does - they rely on a gullable few falling for the trick.
Any specific attack on your machine would look for software that was running on it which could be contacted over the network, and try to exploit a known weakness in the program to give the remote user more control of the machine than was intented by the program.
The best way to know is to monitor what's going on via your firewall - if there are connections happening that you didn't make yourself and that can't be traced to a bit of software you installed, or that is part of the OS (and there are lots of things like that which do connect from time to time) then there could be something dodgy going on.
Stopping infection in the first place is the best bet, though. Good virus protection, up to date software, all appropriate patches, a well set up firewall and a removal of the desire to open every email attachment recieved is as close as you can get to a guarantee of safety. If you do this, you can sleep soundly in the knowledge that your computer is very unlikely to be compromised, as there's always lower-hanging fruit. |
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