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MARCH 8, 2005
By Stephen H. Wildstrom Remote Access, Remote Danger? A reader wonders if programs that allow you to access your work PC from elsewhere open companies to virus attack
Reader Gordon Pinkheard asks: Re: "Beaming Into Your PC from Anywhere" (BW, 3/7/05), does the use of GoToMyPC expose your company to virus attacks when you use it to get remote access to your work computer? You may be using an infected public machine to access an uninfected company machine. A: It's always dangerous to make categorical assertions about security, but this shouldn't be a problem. GoToMyPC only sends commands to the PC in your home or office and only gets screen-drawing instructions back. There is no obvious path that a compromised public machine could use to spread an infection to another machine. Doing so would probably require exploiting a specific, and so far unknown, vulnerability in the GoToMyPC software, so the risk seems very low. Of course, if you use the file-transfer capabilities of GoToMyPC, you could transfer an infected file, just as you could moving an infected file onto a CD or a USB memory key. This column also inspired a number of suggestions from readers for the two programs I discussed. One of the frustrations of writing a column like Technology & You is that there are far more products around than there is time to look at them, and it's almost impossible to be comprehensive. Products that I haven't tried but come recommended by readers include MyWebexPC, which, like LogMeIn, is free, and LapLink Everywhere, which costs $10 a month. OTHER OPTIONS. BeInSync is in a different class, but provides some of the same functions. Instead of providing remote access to your computer desktop, it links computers so that the files or folders you select for synchronization are always available on both machines. The service costs $60 for the first year, $100 thereafter. A 45-day free trial is available. And many readers praised another remote-access product called realVNC. This is a shareware version of a program originally developed by AT&T Labs in Britain, and a variety of commercials versions are also available. I actually use VNC a lot for remote control of servers and other computers on my office network. It's very fast and straightforward, but it works best when linking machines that are on the same network, in part because it lacks the elaborate security features of LogMeIn and GoToMyPC.  Wildstrom is Technology & You columnist for BusinessWeek. You can contact him at techandyou@businessweek.com
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