Security by obsurity WAS: [Re: [MLB-WIRELESS] ap ip numbers.]

[Grant McHerron]

At 12:35 PM 11/05/03, Dave Keller wrote:
>Rik brought up an interesting point in his post about hiding the identity 
>of his Default Gateway by using a non-standard ip address.  While security 
>by obsurity is good, it generally only slows people down from breaking 
>into your network resources.

That much is *very* certain - a while back I was attending an offsite 
training course that bored me to tears - the whole material could have been 
done in 2 to 3 days, even allowing for people who weren't already familiar 
with the topic, etc (but then, of course, the trainers wouldn't have been 
able to charge us for 5 days of their time - who, me, cynical??? Never! 
*coff* :)

Anyhow, we were all attached to a network and it wasn't hard to probe for 
IP addresses and try setting the Internet Explorer config to try the 
low-end ones as proxies - sure enough, I was online in a very short amount 
of time surfing away - maybe it would have taken an extra half hour or so 
if they'd kept servers in the middle/end of the pack. Saved my sanity, 
that's for sure :)

So yeah, it slowed me down, but it certainly didn't stop me.

Cheers,

Grant


------------------------------
Grant McHerron
Tao Ceti Pty Ltd

Level 1, 530 Little Collins St, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia
Ph: +61 3 9909 7067             Fax: +61 3 9228 3257
http://www.taoceti.com.au       grant at taoceti.com.au


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