CS:S vs. dad

[Kalgatha]

ok...my dad thinks that when you connect to a server on CS:S you "open your self up to vulnerability" and he thinks that ppl can copy your hardrive, mess with the settings on your computer and pretty much manitpulate and control your computer via the server. is this true and if it is how often does it happen??

 

[winterfreshpwnz]

Sure if the person is good enough of a hacker, they can even get your IP and all that stuff too, but it doesn't happen often, I mean look how many people play, they wouldn't play the game if all that stuff was happening.

 

[Kalgatha]

ok...my dad is paranoid...he works for a company that deals w/ allot of hackers and such...but he thinks that scince i got CS:S im gonna get hacked and my computer is gonna be useless for a month. please tell me something true that will reasure him that CS:S is a safe game and i won't get hacked

 

[dyserq]

Well .. the number of people playing is immense and unless its a lucky guess, then the chances of him targetting you, via sniffing packets and intercepting data, would be extremely small. Try to use a firewall and say that the CS:S servers are heavily protected, which i am not sure about but probably are, maybe through a 128 bit encryption i am not sure. By the way what kind of company does your dad deal with ? most companies hardly deal withs hackers, nto even the white hat ones...

 

[Kalgatha]

lol...he works for ppl in high athourity and asked me not to mention exactly were he worked...idk why but i will respect him in this matter...he exaggerates and freaks out about nothing allot...but thanx

EDIT: he thinks that each server is an actual person's computer that they have set up to support others like a server would...and that they could get you that way...but i don't really know who or were the servers come from so i didn't argue w/ him there

 

[Dishdog]

If he deals with hackers wouldn't your computer have a firewall,lol.

 

[Kalgatha]

yep...i have bsafe online (gay internet fileter/firewall/popup blocker) norton, spyware s&d, windows gay firewall, AVG antivirus, and sumthing else...but idk what ... all kinds of stuff...but hes still paranoid...

 

[lurkswithin]

The game servers like that are dedicated servers and only used for that purpose and they do you an encryption to stop that sort of thing.
Think about it this way...if that happened at any kind of regularity it would infact ruin the site and there would be absolutely no one ther.
Yes there are hackers that are good enough to hack the servers and get into your system....but they are not going to take that kind of chance just to get some kids (sorry) game pieces.. To pick you out of the thousands of players in there would mean that they already had an in to your system to know who. what, when, and where.
Now you can get some script kiddie that might be able to download a bogus file and drop something in there but that is very unlikely too.
Tell your dad to not worry about that.

 

[Osak]

You can change player setting on CS:S is you are the admin of the Sever, make your config file READONLY to prevent this

 

[Dishdog]

With all of that firewall stuff even if they decided to pick you they would have a huge amount of trouple and probably give up anyways.