Controling a PC

[techwtr]

I have a person who always told me she turned her pc off at night, but when she came in the next day the unit would be back on at the ctl-alt-del screen. I brushed it off as she didn't know how to turn the unit off properly or she was forgetting ( she is a user that hand holding a forgetting what you tell her computer wise is common).

I just put a new XP workstation at her desk. I went to her machine this morning to load some software and I noticed the machine was on. I came over and showed her how to turn it off. She told me she did shut down and power off. What I did was turn the machine off and stood there talking to her for a while. All a sudden the XP powered up out of the blue. All the lights on her modem were on like someone had dialed in, but I didn't hear anything. After I powered down the pc and turned off the modem, PC never came back on again on it's own.

Question...Can a hacker remotely send some codes thru the modem to get a pc to turn on when completely powered off? Let me know. She only uses the modem for UPS software and I am about to change after what I saw today where it is on the lan and no modem is necessary. Please educate me on this one.

 

[SYAR2003]

Are you sure that there is no wake up events enabled in bios . "wake on ring" "wake on lan" etc.

SYAR

 

[John Lewis]

Can a hacker remotely send some codes thru the modem to get a pc to turn on when completely powered off?

Yes. And No. If the computer is really really completely turned off, then this would not be possible. Most computers today are never 'completely' turned off. When you hit the power switch on the front, most of the computer is off but the power supply is still active and the processor is in a standby mode.

Now for the magic hacker signal to turn the thing on . . . it's probably just a wrong number. All that really has to happen is for the phone to ring. Many computers have 'wake on LAN' or 'wake on modem' capabilities. Someone sends a packet over to the LAN or rings the modem, the computer powers up to take care of business. Your case could be either, a certain amount of light activity is normal during boot.

You can generally disable 'wake on xxx' in the system bios to eliminate the problem.

 

[SYAR2003]

Most motherboards i been working with has one ore more of this feature enabled by default . It's worth to check.

 

[techwtr]

I'll check the bios in the morning. I want to say when we initially had to manually modify the bios on the IBM Netvistas before the pc images were certified, I want to say I saw something about that. Thanks for the speedy replies. I am so glad I found this web site several months ago.