Sorry, but this isn't the answer I hoped for. When someone comes into my
house, because I left the front-door wide-open, in know the cause
(front-door wide open), the weak spot (it was open) and the results (credit
cards etc. gone). In this case anyone knows exactly that the week spot is my
door being open. It isn't obvious to me that my being logged in as root is a
week spot.
(BTW: This actually happended to me one night, lucky me, who lives in a
honest village of God-fearing people, nothing was stolen.)
Another example: If I log in to a Novell Netware 3.11 server, using the
account supervisor, I know someone can use this account, because of a
security-leak which was solved with packet signature.
What I'dd really like to know is: what can one do, because I am logged in as
user root, how do they do it (e.g. what weakness in this root-account are
they using), and what can be the results. And I'm especially curious how my
being logged in as user root relates to other security-measures I applied to
me system, like hosts.allow and hosts.deny, only relevant and secure
services enabled in inetd.conf, a nice securetty file and of course a
password different than my wive's first name.
Sander
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jerry L Kreps"
Sander van Vugt wrote:
Hi,
I'm risking the most stupid question of the year, but I do it anyway. I often hear things like "If you ever link to the internet as root you are asking for a world of hurt".
Could anyone please explain what excactly can happen (and im not talking about my own stupidities) when I'm connected to the Internet as root?
Sander
Would you go off to work and leave the front door of your home open, with a sign on the door that says "Come on in, steal everything I have, my credit cards, my jewels, my stereo and tv, then burn the place down. My insurance doesn't care because it won't cover it."
That's what is would be like connecting to the internet as root, except that you don't have to 'go to work'. You can be on your PC typing aways, as I am now, and some cracker could take control of your PC and do the what I mentioned above. Even though SuSE does a good job of installing a relatively safe system, running as root is a bad, bad thing to do, even if you don't connect to the Internet. JLK
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