New high-speed Internet connections in the home bring vulnerability to hackers

NEW YORK (AP) -- Two weeks after he got a fast Internet connection in his home, Carey Bunks noticed he wasn't the only one using his computer. Everything seemed fine with the machine until Bunks,

Tuesday, February 22nd 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) -- Two weeks after he got a fast Internet connection in his home, Carey Bunks noticed he wasn't the only one using his computer. Everything seemed fine with the machine until Bunks, a scientist for BBN Corp., a research company in Cambridge, Mass., checked his computer while reading up on network security.

To his surprise, he found that someone had gained access to the computer via the Internet, and set it up so that it could be controlled from the outside. "They could have done anything. They could have wiped my disk clean," Bunks says.

Bunks believes one reason he was attacked was his new Internet connection, a digital subscriber line, or DSL. Such lines are spreading fast to homes, along with cable modems, which provide similar speeds. Already, 2.2 million U.S. homes have such fast, or "broadband," Internet connections, and the number is expected to grow to more than 10 million in two years, according to analyst Lisa Pierce at Giga Information Group.

But experts warn that the fast connections bring security risks. Unlike regular modems, DSLs and cable modems are connected to the Internet as long as the computer is turned on. This gives hackers a larger window of opportunity to access the computer. "There are people out there, there's no question about it, who go through (the Internet addresses) of cable providers and DSL providers, looking for machines that are connected and seeing if they have any open doors that they can get into," says Milo Medin, chief technical officer of Excite At Home, which provides cable Internet service. "It's absolutely the case that an always-on network presents more opportunity for you to use the system as well as for other people to get to you."

The high speed of a DSL or cable modem connection also makes a target computer a better steppingstone to other computers. Experts believe that recent attacks against some of the most-visited sites on the Web were launched not from a hacker's computer, but from computers taken over by a hacker.

Bunks believes his computer was broken into to provide such a launching pad. "I didn't know anything about security, and in the end I paid the price for it," says Bunks, who had to reinstall the operating system and all the software on his computer.

Ron Buxton of Seattle had a scare one month after he connected his home computer to a cable modem. He came home to find a text file on his computer, put there by a stranger. It explained how easy it was to get access to Buxton's files via the cable modem. "You really feel kind of feel violated," Buxton says.

Luckily, the visitor was only out to warn Buxton that his computer was wide open to others on the same cable modem network, and urged him to protect himself. "I guess it was a good Samaritan," says Buxton, who thinks the warning should have come in a less dramatic way from his service provider, AT&T's At Home. "When I connected with them, they didn't really let me know that this was a problem," he says.

Steve Kipp, a spokesman for AT&T At Home, says installation instructions include warnings about the "File Sharing" option that opens up the files on a Windows computer to other computers. Broadband service providers should do more to make high-speed access secure for home use, says David Remnitz, chief executive of IFsec LLC, a New York network security firm. But he says the ultimate responsibility rests with the owner of the computer. He recommends home users buy a "firewall" program that guards the Internet connection.

Despite his nasty surprise, Buxton is happy that he got the cable modem, which allows him to open up Web pages almost instantly, rather than waiting for them to download via his phone line. "It's amazing! Once you try it, you never want to go back to the old-fashioned dial-up modem," he says.