Vulnerable

in the late evening on Monday, the 1st of March 2004 by Chad

So I’m doing a side job on Saturday for a buddy of mine. Small company, 5 computers, on dial up. My job? They bought Symantec Antivirus Small Business Edition, so go in and install it, and move the dial up modem from the NT server they have to a separate box to be a firewall. No problem, right? Hhehheh… I could have reinstalled every PC there faster!
I brought Mandrake Network Firewall with me to install. Very nice product, installs in less than 10 minutes, and you can configure it in another 10. But I had never used it with dialup before! Never could get pppd to recognize the connection. Everything is supposed to work just peachy right out of the box, but something wasn’t playing nice. Damnit… Worked on it for a few hours, several different reinstalls, etc., before giving up and just installing Wingate. Its not free, butit works.
Anyways, now it ends up all the workstations and server are Windows NT SP4. Circa 1998 if I remember right. Of course Symantec won’t install on anything less than SP6a. So I send Bruce off to download the service pack, and burn it to a cd. Because we don’t have 15 hours to download over dialup. He comes back and there’s a problem because its the international version, not the high encryption version. So off again he goes. Finally install it on the server, finds 3 virii immediately. Found others on a few of the workstations. But the signatures are over a year old. Autoupdate ran after I left. With the full set of current signatures running, he called me to give the final total.
115 different viruses found just on the server. Guess what people, think you can get away with not running antivirus? Think again! Here, I run AV on all the workstations, and my server runs 4 different AV programs on all email going through the system. Thats after I block all .exe, .pif, .com, etc. attachments in the first place, but stuff will still get through occasionally. And firewalls are damn important also. Go out and buy one of those 60$ broadband routers. Or if you have a spare box or you want to play more, download the Mandrake firewall. Its really nice, lots of charts and graphs. But don’t let your system turn into a zombie, spreading denial of service, spam, and who knows what else.

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