[Techtalk] Brand New Install - Firewall thoughts?

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 04:12:28PM -0700 or thereabouts, P Casper wrote:
> 
> I have a stand-alone system running off of dial-up, so I don't expect much
> traffic. Still, better safe than sorry, right?

I am sure I have told the long version of this story at least 
once on these lists, so I'll stick to just the brief version:

A friend once spent an entertaining afternoon watching someone
trying to break into a not-very-special computer over a very
slow link: 9600 baud, shared between a number of machines and
sites. The link was like treacle: really really slow if you
are used to dial-up, let alone broadband.

Whoever was at the other end was quite prepared to spend all
afternoon waiting for responses to come back.

After the cracker had wasted all those hours and was getting
somewhere, my friend pulled the plug at the moment of triumph
and reinstalled.

It's possible that the cracker was simply a script. There
are plenty of "scan for vulnerable machines and break in"
scripts out there, and scripts don't care what speed they
run at.

So yeah, better safe than sorry :)

Telsa (who remembers when 9600 baud was super-fast!)