Housemate's bad internet habits a security risk?

[jellybean]

Hi every1

I have a housemate who is a bandwidth hog. His PC is on 24/7 downloading torrents in the background, downloading everything from dvd rips, music to vast amounts of porn. He doesn't have good internet etiquette or sensible browsing habits, and has had to reformat his Windows-based computer several times this year because it has become so infested with viruses and malware it literally grinds to a halt.

Should I be concerned about the level of threat this could mean for other people's computers in the household, including my Mac?

I recently replaced our Airport Extreme with a Time Capsule. Because our wifi is delivered through the Time Capsule, and thanks to my housemate has a constant flow of torrents coming through it (his torrents alone download at an average speed 448.89KB/s), could my Time Machine backups stored on the Time Capsule be at an increased risk of being hacked?

I've tried talking to him about it on numerous occasions but he says I'm being paranoid. Our ISP is Virgin Media in the UK and we don't have a bandwidth cap, it's just the security I'm mainly concerned about.

 

[waw74]

as long as he doesn't have the time capsule mounted, it should be fairly safe for your backups.

although you are a bit safer being on a mac, make sure you turn the firewall on on your laptop, In the past i was doing some testing, and forgot i had turned on DMZ (no firewall at all) for a particular windows machine, that machine got infected with something, even though i wasn't doing anything on it, and it then infected the other windows machines in the house, whatever it was spread by itself to other open computers.

I run a Linksys router with dd-wrt, which is a linux based firmware. if your roommate has his own ethernet line back to the main router you can create a "virtual lan" for him that is not connected to any other thing on the network.

 

[shouldberunning]

That kind of behavior is unacceptable. Does he pay for the connection, or part of it? I'd lock him out by MAC address and password.

Maybe you can get your own private connection.

 

[rkdiddy]

That is horrible. I guess my roommate that use to always eat all of my peanut butter and leave dishes in the sink wasn't that bad after all.

I know you mentioned you recently upgraded to a TC - do you still have the AEBS? If yes, you could hook that up as the primary router and then use your TC as yours and connect to the AEBS network - does that make sense.

Then all you're doing is sharing a connection and you can set the TC up so it's secure.

 

[AppleMatt]

He doesn't have good internet etiquette or sensible browsing habits.

Tell him it's causing your internet to run slow. Tell him to change the maximum upload in his torrent program etc. to quite a bit below your line speed upload - this usually makes a massive difference. Then get him to limit the download speed too.

Hopefully both of these will leave a 'gap' open for your normal internet traffic to whizz through.

AppleMatt

 

[Bill Gates]

Put him on a different subnet and use QoS to limit his bandwidth, provided that the Airport Extreme has this functionality.