Chapter 14: Advice from a Hacker

Overview

In this chapter, I consider various attack and break-in techniques. To protect your system, you should know how it can be broken into, just as to break into a system you should know how it is protected. These rules apply not only to the computer world but to other areas of life as well. How can you protect against burglars if you don't know how they are most likely to sneak into you house, apartment, or office? If you fortify the most likely entries, the potential burglars may just leave your place alone and move on, looking for an easier prey. Even should they take your defenses as a challenge to their professional skills, your defenses will slow them sufficiently for the police to arrive .

In this chapter, I will present techniques used by computer criminals so that you can develop antidotes against these methods for your defense arsenal.

Some of the questions are considered in a general sense, because it is not always possible to describe precisely a method that has many variations. Take, for example, virus attacks. At first, everything seems simple: Viruses are malicious software that must be sought out and destroyed . But there are different types of viruses requiring individual approaches to neutralizing them. Some general rules can be formulated that can be applied to detecting and neutralizing viruses. Even though these rules may not produce 100% satisfactory results, they will, at least, give you some leverage in your fight.

Experienced users and administrators may consider some of the recommendations offered here outdated. They are mistaken in this respect, because nothing is outdated and everything new is just something old that has been forgotten. There are many Johnny-come-lately users and administrators on the Internet who know modern technologies and events but do not know much from the Internet's recent history. I have noticed that hackers recently started successfully using methods from 10 and even 20 years ago.

Why are old hacking techniques successful? Experienced administrators simply forget about them, and rookies don't know them yet.

With the huge number of users and servers in the today's Internet, there are bound to be at least 1,000 computers whose users will be taken by the simplest break-in techniques. This has to do with the low education level of the average Internet user . By education, I don't mean formal school education but rather computer security savvy. Nobody teaches security to regular users, and most administrators are either too lazy or just don't want to spend money for training to raise their security-level skills.



Hacker Linux Uncovered
Hacker Linux Uncovered
ISBN: 1931769508
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 141

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