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Archiver > WHITNEY > 2003-01 > 1043541525


From: "White Dove" <>
Subject: Re: [WHITNEY-L] Possible problem with FamilyTree Maker
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 19:38:57 -0500
References: <9c.2823cc57.2ae4de29@aol.com> <000e01c27948$cc1ca230$44ef3244@henryoffice>


Henry,
Belated reply to your letter of October last. It seems you were not far
off the
mark with the idea of Family Tree Maker spying on its customers. This has
nothing
to do with the aquaduct.dll file though.......I think!?
Recently we had to bodily throw out a hacker who had somehow penetrated
our
Black Ice firewall and possibly altered files like IExplore.exe or some
other file
connected with browsing. Whatever he did, the result was the same. As soon
as
we connected to the internet, we were pinged by this individual with an
attack on
one of our ports. He was always able to find us, and it was'nt until I
installed McAfee
security that we were able to find out why. As soon as we logged on through
DHCP,
a worm or whatever in OUR system CALLED him on another site. Near as we can
tell, the original attack that allowed penetration was through a spoofed UDP
exploit.
We had to back up all of our personal files, then we government cleaned the
whole
disk with a utility that destroyed EVERYTHING..........9 times over with
random
characters to every bit of every byte of every sector of every track of
every cylinder
on the disk.
Then we re-installed the operating system from scratch. The first
software to be
installed next was the heaviest security software that we could find. Our
applications
followed. I was reluctant to allow Family Tree Maker 8 to be able to
contact the
internet, but my other half wanted it so it was done. Two days passed.
This morning,
the new firewall reported an attack serious enough to bring to our
attention. I consulted
the logs and was presented a list of port scans longer than the Great
Charter of the late
1800's. Some URL 208.209.185.4 was running port scans every 6 seconds and
trying ports in descending sequence that were not assigned to any known
service
for our operating system. Failing to penetrate our security, two other URLs
were
sequentially tried....208.209.185.204 and 208.209.185.11, with the same
sequence
of scans sequentially to unused upper number ports in descending number
order
sequence every 6 seconds. Only an automated professional hacking program
can do that.
Our security provider had a whois run on the attacker and then
we got
the surprise of our lives. These hundreds of attacks and at least one
serious intrusion
attempt with malformed TCP packets came from none other than Genealogy.com
headquarted in Fremont, California, USA. It was a real shock. We pay these
people
over 400 dollars American per year for subscriptions, eat all their cookies,
use their
family tree software, and A&E Cable Networks' Genealogy.com is then found
trying
to worm their way into our system. The only thing that I suppose that would
interest
them would be our .ftw files. Our daughter has a .ftw file over 50
megabytes with
thousands of individuals. We warned her about these people from the giant
cable
TV and movie network that is active suing and pursuing people around the
world
for alleged 'piracy' while getting itself sued and pursued by governments
for price
fixing and predatory business practices........and now we caught their
grubby
fingers in our data. We have documentary proof of what they have done and
have
saved it to CD.....several CD's and put them different places.
We are considering cancelling our subscriptions to Genealogy.com, Family
TreeMaker's
online search component. We have put up with the constant random surprise
lures and
traps from this program trying to get us to click on the wrong button at the
right time and
'share' our data.......for years. No more. We are even thinking of not
using the program
any more except that we have a lot of data on .ftw files that would have to
be imported
into another program. It was so much nicer when the program was owned by
Broderbund and did not spy. Now that it is owned by the mass media cartel
it seems
that those days are gone. Hopefully we will not be simply driven out of
windows as well
by the lying and the spying.
Well those are the facts, folks. What more can we say. This is
'non-gen', but maybe
it is, as it deeply affects our ability to securely practice our hobby
without danger of
some putrid outsider not only stealing our data, but then copyrighting it,
selling it, and
telling us that we no longer own our own family names.

Lee M. Castleton


feel free to forward this everywhere....it is the truth, and the truth makes
free


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