Conclusion of Hacking

Conclusion of Hacking

On the other hand, using and demonstrating intrusion techniques
should be done with due care, in order not to promote them as a means
to break into other people’s systems. Other sites and system
administrators will take a very dim view of your activities if you decide
to use their hosts for security testing without advance authorization.
They would rightly take legal action against you if they perceive it as an
attack.
Typical scenario
It is always useful to use an external account to look at one’s own
systems from the outside. One of the most rewarding steps usually is to
gather as much information as possible about your own hosts. There is
a wealth of network services to look at: finger, showmount, and rpcinfo
are good starting points, but also look at DNS, whois, sendmail (smtp),
ftp, uucp, and as many other services as you can find.
One of the main issues that is most often overlooked is trust
relationships. There are many situations, for instance, when a server
(note that any host that allows remote access can be called a server) can
permit a local resource to be used by a client without password
authentication when password authentication is normally required.
Performing an assessment on your own systems should uncover such
weak links.
Although the concept of how host trust works is well understood by
most system administrators, the dangers of trust, and the practical
problem it represents, irrespective of hostname impersonation, is one of
the least understood problems we know of on the Internet. What is
rarely understood is how networking so tightly binds security between
what are normally considered disjoint hosts.
It is also interesting to note that common solutions to security problems
such as running Kerberos or using one-time passwords or digital
tokens are ineffective against many forms of attacks. While many of
these security mechanisms do have their use, one should be aware that
they are not a total security solution - they are part of a larger struggle to
defend your
system.