Date: Tue Apr 25 23:15:16 2006
From: pauls at utdallas.edu (Paul Schmehl)
Subject: What is wrong with schools these days?

Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 12:00:22 PDT, Bill Stout said:
>> You know, having made a few NTexploit lists in the past, I wanted to
>> make the point the M$ was less secure.  Unfortunately the facts were
>> against me.
>>
>> Two IIS 6.0 vulnerabilities reported from 2003-2006 
>> http://secunia.com/product/1438/ 
>> Twenty-eight Apache 2.0 vulnerabilities reported from 2003-2006
>> http://secunia.com/product/73/
> 
> Scroll down a bit, and you'll discover a nice pie chart of how critical
> they were - 50% of the IIS were 'Moderate', while only 33% of the Apache were.
> You can make statistics lie any way you want. ;)
> 
> Also, selecting IIS/Apache, which is installed on few Windows or Linux boxes
> by default, doesn't tell you anything regarding the underlying security. You
> could as well chosen Microsoft Office and OpenOffice and made the same claim.
> 
As I'm sure Valdis knows, I wasn't trying to make the point that any OS 
or application is more or less secure than any other.  You can get into 
pissing contests about your OS/application being better than someone 
else's until everyone turns blue in the face, and it won't change the 
fact that *all* OSes and applications are insecure if incorrectly 
configured and/or maintained.  I have long had the policy that, if 
you're not going to use an application (like apache or IIS) then it 
should not even be installed, because, if it is installed and not 
enabled, it will not be properly maintained and updated.  And I can 
*guarantee* you that *someone* will enable it sooner or later, in its 
vulnerable state and no one will realize it until the box is hacked.

I also have a policy that I avoid software that has a poor security 
track record.  So, I don't use Internet Explorer - on any platform - and 
I don't use sendmail - on any platform.  The first thing I do, when I 
set up a FreeBSD box is uninstall sendmail and install Postfix.  It's 
not that I like Postfix more.  It's that Postfix has had very few 
vulnerabilities in it, and sendmail has them routinely.  It tells me 
that the programmers writing the former understand security better than 
the programmers writing the latter.  It's nothing personal.  They both 
do a job that needs to be done.  One makes me worry less.

If you have something installed on a computer, you *must* keep it up to 
date, even if you *never* use it, because the bad guys *will* use it. 
100% guaranteed.  Personally, I prefer unix (FreeBSD) and Mac (OSX), and 
I avoid Windows whenever possible.  But I've been running Windows since 
the early DOS days, and I have yet to have a single box I maintained 
broken into.  (Nor have I had a unix box or Mac that I maintained broken 
into.)  That doesn't make me a genius.  It just means I've been 
conscientious and lucky.

I've seen a lot of break-ins, on every single OS you can imagine.  I 
have *yet* to see a properly maintained box be broken into. 
Configuration and maintenance is everything.  OS and application is 
almost irrelevant.  If you leave the keys in your Ferrari and the door 
unlocked, it's going to get stolen.  It doesn't matter at all that the 
Ferrari is worth 100 times as much, goes 100 times faster or is 100 
times more beautiful than my beat-up, old, rusty Pontiac.  The Pontiac 
is locked, and I have the keys in my pocket.

If more people understood this, we'd have a lot less computer break-ins.

-- 
Paul Schmehl (pauls@...allas.edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/
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