Kat,
If you MUST do remote access on your *nix box, never use Telnet
-- use ssh2 instead. It's encrypted and secure (well, as secure
as anything gets -- nothing is totally crack-proof!)
Anytime someone asks me to take a look at their Linux boxes, the
first things I make sure to do is turn off all unused services,
kill Telnet and wu-ftp. Those steps alone keep most linux boxes
reasonably secure.
(wandering off course a bit) My very first Linux box (Redhat 6.1)
was cracked through a wu-ftp exploit. I had read about it, so I
pulled the network plug to the internet router and proceeded to
see if I could crack my own box from a local machine. It took
about 10 minutes and I had root access! It was the wee hours of
the morning by then, so I made a mental note shutdown wu-ftp and
disable it before I went to bed. I already had downloaded ProFTP
to replace it. The next morning I got up and saw that the link
light for my server was not "on", so not thinking clearly I
plugged the network cable into the router.
About noon, I went back to the server area and saw the activity
light for the server link going crazy. Knowing that the ftp and
web server should be "down", I thought it was odd that there was
so much network activity going on. Then I remembered... I quickly
checked my logs and found that someone had used the same wu-ftp
exploit and had cracked my box only minutes earlier!!! D'OH!!!
So I quickly pulled the plug again, gathered all the log files
(the cracker had not had time yet or was too stupid to cover his
tracks) and sent them off to his ISP's abuse department. The next
day I got an email from them saying his cable modem account had
been terminated. So at least some good came of it.
After a fresh install, all was well and the server was up and
running for over a year with no security breaches. Linux systems
are only as secure as their administrators make them...
Matt Pobursky
Maximum Performance Systems
On Sat, 19 Jan 2002 10:38:47 +0800, Kathy Quinlan wrote:
{Quote hidden}>Ok,
>
>I love FreeBsd, it is yet to let me down (I let me down the last
>time, ended up in hospital the day a major bug was found and my
>box got hacked through telnet :o(( )
>
>I found FreeBSD to be the easiest to install.
>
>Regards,
>
>Kat.
>
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