Re: Examples of legit nmap usage?

[Bennett Todd <bet () mordor net>]

1999-09-20-15:52:27 Andreas Kostyrka:
> [ a lengthy explanation of the deficiencies of the "hard outside, shoft
> chewy inside security design, with poor internal security and a firewall ]

I don't disagree with you; I sincerely hope that a combination of replacing
bad OSes with good ones, replacing bad apps with good ones, and using good
automation and management tools will make it possible to systematically harden
the inside to the point where we can toss the firewalls.

I don't defend the poor-internal-security design; I simply caution it exists.
The fact is, there are machines on in-house nets that nmap will crash.  It's
not good that they exist. Keeping them around and unprotected where any
in-house user can crash them is not a good practice. Lobbying to improve
things is a good professional pursuit.

But doing unauthorized things (e.g. a big nmap scan) that goes out and crashes
them needlessly is a bad idea, particularly if people can figure out that it
was you who did it when they need someone to blame. The argument "they
shouldn't have left a crashable machine like that" won't impress management,
you'll still catch the blame, and the severity of the consequences will depend
more on who got inconvenienced and how badly than on what you did.

-Bennett