Re: Can a hacker attack through the welcome screen?

I've had a few discussions about this with other techs. The general
consensus(and we might wrong) was that the computer would be wide open to
the internet if your connected to always on broadband(dialup is no prob),
cause the firewall is not loaded. But, since some windows processes are also
not loaded the exploits a hacker could do would be limited, if any at
all(especially if the computer is updated with all security patches). We
believe a hacker wouldn't have much or anything to work with. Possibly a
trojan could be loaded, I suppose. This would be from a cold boot and
assuming you even pull an IP address before windows loads(which I don't know
for sure if it does or not). I'm no hacker so maybe there's things they
could do before windows loads, but it seemed to us that your pretty safe. If
you logged onto windows completely and then just logged the user off, it
might be a different story. So to sum up, we really don't know, but it would
seem logical that your safe.

"Rocky" <yr@tampabay.rr.com> wrote in message
news:i4w0b.55986$K4.2865683@twister.tampabay.rr.co m...

> Hello. I noticed today that I had 80 plus messages in my inbox, most of
> them viruses sent from the lsu.edu domain. The person who used the

computer

> earlier today said it was real slow, and when she went to use it, it

didn't

> respond. She said she turned it on, walked away, and went back after 6
> hours to use it. Well, all that time it was at the welcome screen, and I
> was wondering if a hacker could have broke in being that zone alarm, and

the

> rest of the OS wasn't loaded? I looked at the processes, "Lass" and
> "Svchost.exe" were using half the resources, for what I don't know? I'm
> going to run a virus scan, but aside from all the viruses sent to my

inbox

> nothing else has happened.
>
> Thank you very much for your response.
>
>