Re: no daemons listening and errata updates (secure or not?)

["Michael Boman" <michael.boman () gmail com>]

On 7/28/06, sun sadm <sunsadm () gmail com> wrote:
> Hi colleague
>
> I am using Fedora Core as workstation. To lock down the OS, I disable
> all network daemons: only dhclient is listening for network
> connections. Furthermore I regularly update my installation using yum.
> All other setting are out-of-the-box from Red Hat.
>
> Is my simple setup secure to be connected directly to the Internet?
> Does an attacker have a chance to break my workstation? How high is
> the risk? What can I do to improve the security? How would you break
> in my system? Please show me vulnerabilites in my setup.
>
> Nico

There is always a risk of being compromised, but you are doing good
progress. I would put up an iptables firewall to make sure that no
errant network service accidentally being enabled would compromise
your security (you could investigate blocking outbound traffic too, if
you are really paranoid). The rest is basically behavior: only run
software that comes from good sources, beware of strangers etc....

If there is no service to break in to (and there is no nasty kernel
bug you can exploit), the only way to get in to your system would be
tricking you to open it up in one way or another (browser/email
client/other software you use exploits, get you to install trojaned
software etc...).

Best regards
Michael Boman

--
IT Security Researcher & Developer
http://proxy.11a.nu | http://www.11a.nu

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