Re: distributed.net and seti@home

[OFriedrichs () SECURITY-FOCUS COM (Oliver Friedrichs)]

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> what's always bugged me about things like seti@home and
> distributed.net is the fact that they are in place to conduct
> massive network sniffing.
>
> all these clients on a lot of different networks running software
> that report some kind of info (who can tell what is sent?) to a
> central point...scares me.

I think in theory your right.  However in reality, I for one would
notice if my system was running an NDIS driver sitting in promiscuous
mode (infact, I doubt it would run, since all of the other drivers I
have running would probably conflict with it).  Either way, someone
would notice this.  I doubt distributed.net would willingly do
something like this, however attackers have replaced legitimate
software with trojans before, and it will happen again.

Oliver Friedrichs
securityfocus.com

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