Message-ID: <D89E9C009C6E5B4381DCBE89CA703CEE3E2545@MI8NYCMAIL04.Mi8.com>
From: pwicks at oxygen.com (James Patterson Wicks)
Subject: "MS Blast" Win2000 Patch Download

I manage a national enterprise and we block port 135 on all external firewall interfaces.  There is scant reason why this port needs to be open from external IP's.  If an application requires open access to port 135 over the Internet, it's a piss poor application written by a programmer who should know better.  When our company started out, had one vendor who though it would be cool to allow all of it's Exchange customers to use the full Outlook client from anywhere, including from home, without using a VPN tunnel.  Needless to say that they are nearly out of business now.  The real solution to the real problem is not working with crappy vendors, stop treating the security policy like toilet paper and create network environments that can be secured against known threats and set to monitor for the unknown threats.  If your political environment at work is such that creating such an environment is impossible, then it is up to you whether you want to continue working there.  The only thing that you can do is advise the executive staff of the risk that they take when implementing poor security and hope that they take your advice seriously.  If they don't give you the money to implement the necessary security, implement the best security that you can and DOCUMENT your actions and the risks associated with it.  If the environment is so bad that you cannot even do that, then you should be surfing Monster.com for a new job rather than ranting at people on this forum for offering sound suggestions to combat the problem.


-----Original Message-----
From: full-disclosure-admin@...ts.netsys.com
[mailto:full-disclosure-admin@...ts.netsys.com]On Behalf Of Brad Bemis
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 12:22 PM
To: Ed Carp; Anjan Dave; full-disclosure@...ts.netsys.com
Subject: RE: [Full-Disclosure] "MS Blast" Win2000 Patch Download


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> It's probably worth mentioning even more that if you have 
> port 135 bocked on your firewall, you wouldn't have to worry 
> about it :(

Personally I am getting tired of people making these kinds of comments.  It
is obvious that these people have never had responsibility for a
large-scale, multi-national enterprise environment that touches so many
different organizations world-wide that it is nearly impossible to account
for every single Internet access point (not to mention remote access and
mobile computers).  While it may be true that blocking port 135 at the
firewall would work in an ideal environment, very few of us that deal with
security matters in the real world have anything that even begins to
approach an ideal environment.  We need to be discussing real solutions to
real problems, not verbalizing a continued ignorance of reality.  Sorry for
the rant, but this topic is getting old quickly!     

Thank you for your time and attention,

========================
Brad Bemis
========================





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