EC2 Proxy/VPN

Today I ran across a post talking about using Amazon’s EC2 service as a VPN to secure your wireless connection when on a public wi-fi. I read through the how-to and figured I’d write up my much easier and quicker way of doing basically the same thing, plus I think it maybe a bit cheaper.

  1. Create a EC2 instance, you don’t need anything fancy just the very basic.
  2. After you’ve created a EC2 instance and downloaded your key pairs setup your ssh tunnel on your system by doing the following:
    1. Download PuTTY
    2. Download the PuTTYGen tool
    3. Convert the amazon EC2 key pair you downloaded to a ppk file.
    4. Under the Sessions section put the default user name for you EC2 instance followed by the EC2 instance URL in the “Host Name” section. (exp. [email protected])
    5. Click and expand the “SSH” section and click on the “Auth” section
    6. Under the “Auth” section click the “Browse…” button under the “Authentication parameters” and find the key pair that you converted to a ppk file using PuTTYGen.
    7. Under the “SSH” section click on the “Tunnels” section.
    8. Under the “Source port” input a random port like 7070.
    9. Choose the “Dynamic” radio button and leave the “Auto” radio button selected.
    10. Click back on the “Session” section and under the “Saved Sessions” give your session a name and click the “Save” button.
    11. Now click the “Open” button at the bottom of the window and you should now have a SSH tunnel to your Amazon EC2 instance.

Using the command line SSH:
– Open the tunnel by using a command like this –> ssh -C2qTnN -D [Random Port] ec2-user@[EC2 Instance URL] (exp. ssh -C2qTnN -D 7070 [email protected])

Now that you have the tunnel running all you have to do is point your browser/software to use the SOCKS proxy 127.0.0.1:[Random Port You Selected]. (exp. 127.0.0.1:7070)

Anti-Virus Test

Today I decided to test out a number of the anti-virus scanners that are floating around the internet. I didn’t do a very in-depth test, just gathered a archive of 3765 viruses and tested each anti-virus scanner to see how many of the viruses it found and how many files it scanned.

Note: Some of the viruses had files archived in side of them so the scanned number will sometimes be higher then the number of files I listed above.

Microsoft Security Essentials (Scanned: 3799, Found: 3668)
* Quick scan.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010 (Scanned: 3851, Found:3680)
* Requires reboot after install.
* Slow scan.

Sophos Anti-Virus (Small Business) (Scanned: 3772, Found: 3631)
* Is designed for a management environment (10+ systems) and not a SOHO environment.
* Bad scan reports.

Sunbelt Vipre (Scanned: 190, Found: 13)
Don’t know what happened with this but it wouldn’t scan more then 190 files.
* Quick install.
* Requires reboot after install.
* By default it doesn’t scan inside archives.
* Can’t scan archives inside other archives.

F-Secure Anti-Virus (Scanned: 3757, Found: 3698)
* Requires reboot after install.
* Minimal interface
* If system has low memory it disables email scanning and other advanced process monitoring by default.

Avast Pro (Scanned: 3796, Found: 3644)
* Requires reboot after install.
* Quick install.
* Really quick scan.

Panda Cloud Anti-Virus
I stopped the scan after letting it run for about 10 min. and it had only scanned 233 files and only found 150 infections.
* Quick install
* High CPU usage.
* Requires network connection
* Very very slow scan.

ESET NOD32 (Scanned: 3739, Found: 3622)
* Quick virus database update.
* Very fast scan.

ClamAV for Windows (Doesn’t support scanning one file or directory)
* Easy install
* Can’t scan individual files or directory’s

Avira AntiVir (Scanned: 3773, Found: 3716)
* Quick scan.
* Bit high on system resources

AVG Anti-Virus (Scanned: 3774, Found: 3702)
* Somewhat slow install.
* Low system foot-print.