It's the 15th of the month, so that means a new crypto-gram from computer security big boss man Bruce Schneier. The first item is about honeypots, which are network connected computers set up to monitor crackers "in the wild." One such installation is called Honeynet, and is described this way: The Honeynet Project was initiated to shine a light into this darkness. This team of researchers has built an entire computer
network and completely wired it with sensors. Then it put the network up on the Internet, giving it a suitably enticing name and content, and recorded what happened. What did they find out? Well... A random computer on the Internet is scanned dozens of times a day. The life expectancy of a default installation of Red Hat 6.2 server, or the time before someone successfully hacks it, is less than 72 hours. A common home user setup, with Windows 98 and file sharing enabled, was hacked five times in four days. Systems are subjected to NetBIOS scans an average of 17 times a day. And the fastest time for a server being hacked: 15 minutes after plugging it into the network.
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- jim 6-15-2001 6:47 pm