Could my computer have been hacked?

I play online poker and up until now I've only used the default firewall which comes with Windows Vista.

I had some games where it seemed as though I was playing against a person who could see my cards. I eventually gave into my paranoia and reinstalled windows to see if this would change anything, I sat down at the table of the suspected player and played 3 hands with me and left the table. I have not seen him at the site since (i think may be on another account).

This has made me wonder if there was a chance that he could have hacked my computer and had access to see my cards?

If so, how can I protect myself from them?

 

I should also say that through some investigation, I may know who this person is or at least his place of work.

 

Or maybe he is just hacking in the game and knows all the players cards.

 

When you reinstalled Windows, did you do a 'destructive' reinstall or a 'non-destructive' reinstall? If you have a computer from vendors such as Dell, HP, etc. you will sometimes have this option. If you want to have some level of confidence that everything bad is gone, you should do a 'destructive' reinstall.

 

Thanks, I have never heard of a destructive reinstall...I just did a regular re-install but I'll look to do that if I ever have to do it again.

I now installed Windows Firewall Control on my vista system. I have a question, if I enable applications like firefox and my pokersite, am I leaving myself vulnerable again or are these okay to enable? (they don't work if I don't enable them).


Thanks!

 

Basically a 'destructive' reinstall is formatting the Windows Partition(s) and reinstalling Windows and included applications/drivers to exactly the same as when you purchased the PC.

A 'non-destructive' reinstall is where you just sort of do a Windows Repair leaving any other files (including much of any Malware) untouched. Windows is reinstalled along with software and drives which came with the new PC. There is No format of the Windows System Partition(s). Your personal files are left untouched.

 

Thanks,

Do you think windows firewall control is good enough to stop this intruder?

Also, windows firewall control stops me from using stuff like Firefox unless I enable it. By doing this, am I compromising my security?

 

The short answer is probably not. The long answer is more complicated.

I say probably not because when you enable Firefox, or your poker software, you are telling the firewall that these programs are allowed to do whatever they want when they try to access the net. The implication of that is that everything else that hasn't been enabled can not access the net at all. This is a good thing.

However, this is not bulletproof for a few reasons. The simplest way to mess this up is if you enable a program that maybe shouldn't be. I will assume you did not do that.

Here is the more advanced way this could fail. Lets assume your computer was infected with malware whose purpose was to reveal your poker cards to another player on the network. If this malware ran in its own process, your firewall should stop its access to the network, assuming you didn't accidentally also grant it access. But, it is possible that this malware has injected itself into the poker program. Doing this would give it easy access to read your cards, and also when it tries to send your card info out to the net, your firewall will see it as your poker program, and allow it.

I am writing this just from my own personal knowledge of defeating firewalls, and not based on any information of poker malware. I do not know if this type of poker malware exists. But, if I were going to write poker malware, that is how I would do it.