Date: Wed, 05 Apr 1995 00:17:45 +0100 From: Gary Palmer <gary@palmer.demon.co.uk> To: smmcgee@ncbc.edu Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: SATAN ported?? Message-ID: <3299.797037465@palmer.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 04 Apr 1995 18:03:06 -0000." <199504041700.RAA28295@localhost>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In message <199504041700.RAA28295@localhost>, Sean McGee writes: >Not in my optimistic point of view! It was designed to "find" your security >holes so that you can "plug" them. After all, the acronym stands for Security >Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks, not Some Assinine Tool for >Attacking Networks. If some wannabe hacker happens to rewrite the code > - then yes, it can be used to attack, but then what about guns when you >apply them to the same reasoning ?? You don't need to re-write the code to use SATAN for attack - it's how it works. Most traditional publically available scanners (cops, etc) have been internal scanners, i.e. run on the machine you want to check. SATAN is a tool which I can run on my box here in the UK (well, if I had more memory perhaps) and use it to scan ncbc.edu's security. It does this by going through similar steps that a hacker would, except one hell of a lot faster. It may have been designed to find holes in a system, but sensible system setups (e.g. having a very rich text root password, careful control of NFS exports, etc) will do far more for system security than SATAN ever could. Gary
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3299.797037465>