jonheal;161938 Wrote: > Now, here's where my lack of networking expertise comes into play ... if > a port is open, but nothing's listening on it, or in this case, only > SlimServer, is the only way into the network through that port, THROUGH > Slimserver?
Perhaps I typed out of turn here as I can't answer that question. However installing 'SmoothWall' (http://www.smoothwall.org/) on an old PC (too slow to run SlimServer) really opened my eyes. There are constant connection attempts from rogue IPs. My SmoothWall has been "modded" to submit reports to http://www.mynetwatchman.com/ and often sends over 100 reports an hour. I think the most it ever sent was over 150 an hour. Every IP is being positively bombarded. These are mostly bots, no one has the time to do all this manually. But when the bots find something interesting they report the results back to the people who run them, who then do some follow-up. Woe be unto you who gets a bored hacker interested in what this open port 9000 is all about... Since I'm not a hacker, I'm not sure exactly what they could do - but I have some idea. They would check what protocol is valid on that port and discover that HTTP seems to be valid. They would then see your SlimServer page, lots of fun stuff to do there but nothing to turn your computer into part of their zombie network. But hey, there's a link to Slim Devices on that page, and whoa, SlimServer's code is freely available! So he could then have a look at the code and see how it can be bent to his will. This seems unlikely as a lot of hacking activity is by organized crime that focus on the low-hanging fruit first. However there are some out there who hack just for fun - and I would think hacking SlimServer would be fun and interesting for a hacker who knows a bit of Perl. -- Mark Lanctot ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=30564 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
