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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Level3 routing issues?
"dave" == Dave Stewart <[email protected]> writes: dave> I've seen various references to this worm firing off and dave> saturating networks worldwide within 1 minute... if *that* isn't dave> scary, I don't know what is. It shows that someone, with the dave> right tools and enough vulnerable servers can take out a good dave> portion of the Internet in seconds. And how can we predict dave> *every* possible issue and block it? Exactly!! This is why the Right Answer (TM) is to get end-users to secure their systems and networks so that an attacker can't get a critical mass of hosts in 1 minute (or even 1 month). You can only do so much on the ISP networks. At some point, everyone needs to admit that it's impossible for us to win this battle as long as people are allowed to not care about the security of their systems. I still remember the despair I felt at how successful the sadmind worm was with Solaris and Windows vulnerabilies that were over 2 years old. Hell, that was a long time ago, and I bet there are still systems on the Internet that have those vulnerabilies. I mean, that's negligence if anything is. dave> I think there's only so much one can do in advance. Sure, we dave> all know we shouldn't have these servers exposed, but again, dave> many are in the position of having to leave them open to some dave> extent - case in point, I have a developer who uses dialup dave> (because he's in the sticks in northern Georgia, and nothing dave> else is available, and he's a skinflint who uses the free or dave> nearly-free dialup providers)... he's also not going to use a dave> VPN... he'll just bitch because he can't get to the server. Note that in the case of a worm, a VPN could work against you. If you have all the right filters in place at your "perimeter" and yet let your employees in through a VPN solution of some sort, you could still be screwed if one of their home systems gets infected somehow. IMHO, Michael
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