On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 1:44 PM, Nicholas Blatter <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 11:25 AM, Dallin Terry <[email protected]> > wrote: > > I thought Cisco had changed it so the user agent wasn't the only thing > > it looked at to identify your system. > > Not that I know of. > > I use my Windows partition on my laptop quite a bit and the last thing > I want is that stupid Cisco software installed in my browser. In > addition to increasing the attack surface of the browser, I refuse to > run Symantec's latest crapware so the scan would always fail. > > To avoid it I use the User Agent Switcher addon [1] for Firefox to > change all instances of "Windows" to "Linux". Switching temporarily > to my Linux UA I can get on the wireless network without installing > anything and then switch back to the default for normal browsing. > > But shhhh. Don't tell OIT or they'll try and "fix" it. > > Nick > > [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59 > I believe they check for about a dozen different anti-virus softwares, so if you don't like Symantec, then you can install something else. I highly recommend some sort of Anti-Virus on Windows and I'm warming up to the idea on Mac as well. There is so much code out there that will run in bowsers, javascript, Java, Flash, Acrobat, etc that doesn't need specific machine code anymore that I'm feeling that Macs are going to be more vulnerable in the near future. There was a study that 80% of reputable websites (CNN, bank sites, etc) had been compromised with drive-by-downloading code. So Joe Schmo, who is a computer expert and knows better, checks the SSL cert when logging into his bank site, and never knew that he downloaded a back-door Trojan by just going to the reputable site. The hackers are getting more clever, and there are more script kiddies out there using that code, it's a scary place to be on the Internet. I'm going to go back to making a tin foil hat for my house now. Robert LeBlanc Life Sciences & Undergraduate Education Computer Support Brigham Young University
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