Re: Forwared to me

[tsoome () UT EE (Toomas Soome)]

On Mon, 13 Jul 1998, Michael H. Warfield wrote:

>         I would also like to remark about one thing.  Solar Designer
> quoted one possible action from the advisory.  That one point was a
> suggestion made by my Sun contacts.  It was NOT our recommendation as
> the action to be taken.  My PERSONAL recommendation is to disable finger
> if at all possible.  It provides way too much information about accounts and

actually, finger is only top of ice mountain, what it will do:
setpwent()
  while( getpwent() ) {}
endpwent()

nothing more. but, if this is such simple, nothing will prevent users
INSIDE to write this; easy and simple way to block sysadmins while
cleaning trails or whatever. Actually, there are not only password tables
around - there are tables for services, mail aliases etc. After all,
calling NIS functions directly is not such big mystery...

just another way to generate load for server- if there are netgroups used
for some kind of access control - tcpd wrapper, NFS access etc...

so, even if You can survive one type of attack - netgroups are not too big
etc, combining different types may be just enough to bring down system...

toomas soome
Tartu University, Estonia
--
Gee, I feel kind of LIGHT in the head now, knowing I can't make my
satellite dish PAYMENTS!