Security labs & paranoia
There’s nothing better than security classes, at least at our university. I’ve already taken a really nice general-purpose security lab, introducing many of the basic tools like nmap, nessus, firewalk, tcpdump, netcat, &c. During that lab we got to scan network topology and vulnerabilities, take over a machine utilizing a vulnerability in a php script and analyzing an infected machine. This semester i’m taking an internet security lab and last night i finished the first challenge. Scanning a remote network with nmap, combing through a nice tcpdump log with ethereal – it doesn’t get much funnier than that.
The amazing thing about these courses is that you’ll see how insecure most systems, networks and protocols out in the wild are. The skills necessary for a challenge like the one i took yesterday can be obtained within a few hours by any person with some basic knowledge of how computers and networks work, given the right starting points. Running a network sniffer in promiscuous mode isn’t rocket science and could possibly get you a lot of private data and account information. Sure, you shouldn’t be using an open access point without some decent security measures like vpn tunneling in place, but let’s face it, most people don’t bother with this kind of thing and these problems will only grow with more and more open wifi access points in public places and undereducated users being eager to put that shiny new centrino laptop to good use outside their home. Just sniffing the network traffic won’t immediately give you access to encrypted data, but http-, pop3- or telnet-traffic will leave some juicy clear-text usernames and passwords in your log-files, let alone any site someone browses to or the contents of their e-mails. Just thinking about this makes me wanna change all my passwords and pile some extra layers of security onto my daily computing routine.
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