Dropped Packets

A friend the other day said, “Turn off your computer when you are not using it.  Leaving it on 24/7 is good way to be hacked.  Plus, it is more environmentally friendly to not leave your gear on all the time.”  This is true.  Popular culture would have us believe that turning off computers is paramount to saving our planet.  Research the title of the article and see how many hits return about security.  Security should not be an afterthought on this matter.

There are plenty of reasons to leave your computer on.  Cycling the power on and off is a strain on systems – especially when you are fond of not shutting down properly.  The time of instantly accessibly operating systems disappeared in the early nineties.  Nowadays we have to be kind, gentle, and mind the hard drive platters as they spin and rattle inside our little machines.  Software updates hog system resources when they download and install.  Leaving the computer on at night saves that bother – let the computer sort out all of that when we sleep.  Some people are religious about turning their computers off at night.  That is great, but what about when you leave for work.

Evil lurks on the Internet at every turn and every hour.  That might be a too dramatic, but it is true.  People make a living off stolen information, but that has been addressed already (see Pirate Inlet).  Every time a computer is on a network, it is susceptible to attack.  A powered off computer is off the network.  Unplugging it from the network is a good idea too.  A computer is not much good without a network these days though.

So much so that people are interested in keeping computers attached to the network all the time.  Microsoft invested in some research on the matter (see Somniloquy external networking card lets PCS “sleep talk” essential connectivity functions).   The work was presented at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation 2009.  This device was designed to help defend systems by patching system files and reducing the attack space a hacker may use by reducing the available number of processors (see Somniloquy: Augmenting Network Interfaces to Reduce PC Energy Usage).  All of this is debatable of course.  Marcus Ranum’s Ultimate Firewall would work just as well.

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