Re: Serious security holes in Win 95, 98 and NT !!

Dave Mussulman ( dave@vircom.com )
Sun, 09 Aug 1998 11:38:32 -0500

At 07:17 AM 8/9/98 , you wrote:
>Read all about it at http://www.hackerproof98.com/news.htm .
>
>The article says something about a utility that can scan 254 Class C
>addresses at a time and check if the computers using those addresses are
>vulnerable. Most of them will be and their hard drives are easy pickings.
>
>Can anybody verify this ?
>What do you think ?

The idea is if you use sharing and share your protected files without a
password, and you connect to the Internet it is possible for someone to
connect to your computer and access those shares. If you, for example,
share your entire C drive with read/write permissions and don't password
protect it, then someone could walk in, grab your files, hose your
settings, and leave.

It's a security hole, yes, but one made by exploited poor administration
more than anything else. If you're sharing information you don't want
others to access, put a password on it. Always password protect any
writable directory on your computer.

If you don't want to purchase their software, do a search for NetWatcherPro
-- it's a free little program that log users sessions with your shared
files and you can setup bans appropriately. It looks like it does the same
thing as Hackerproof98, but NWP is free. (Well, at least it used to be
free -- just went back to his website
http://wwwedu.cs.utwente.nl/~verschoo/html/software.html and it looks like
NWP is now commercial -- but I'm sure there are other similar products
around that are shareware/freeware still.)

Dave Mussulman
Vircom Technical Support / Voice: (514) 990-2532

mailto:support@vircom.com / http://www.vircom.com / telnet://game-master.com

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