In this case, secure = non-functional. Win95 barely had networking capabilities 
and what it did have were bolted onto the sides and often broke, much like 
W3.11/WFW. All three of which were using the winsock.dll that was third party 
at the time which was a protocol stack tool that came into being before MS knew 
what IP was. Apple had an IP stack bolt on back in the days of AppleTalk 
version 1/2, it was sorta stable, much better than winsock.dll.

If this is all you are looking for, you really could get into stripping the IP 
stack down in a linux or bsd kernel and be much happier, stable, secure and 
functional. But remember that there are far too many distro's that already do 
this to bother with if you need to get work done and this is not a hobby 
interest.

On the issue of Nessus finding W95, would you bother researching an OS that was 
well over a decade old? At the time most companies that needed functional, 
networked, workstations running MS software would have run NT Server or NT Pro 
(3.51 & 4.0), not Win95.

Regards,

-- Dan

Dan Bowman
Director ITS & Managed Services
Tenable Network Security
http://www.tenablesecurity.com/

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Riemer Brouwer
Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 13:29
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Nessus: no vulns in Windows95?

Apologies for any off-topic comment. It does, however, address the issue
that Nessus is unable to properly identify a Windows95 box, at least in my
VMWare setup, Nessus comes up blank: it doesn't notice any vulns and only
has a few information issues, which are very low risk. Also, Michel Arboi's
reply that an all-out, aggressive Nessus scan would bring down a W95 box is
not something I have been able to reproduce.

Could this be due to a VMWare issue? Scanning an XP VMWare box works fine,
though. I realize this is merely a theoretical question as no one would
seriously consider downgrading to anything less than XP Professional.

Regards,

Riemer Brouwer, MBA CISA CISM CISSP ISSMP
IT Audit Manager
American University of Beirut

Tel. +961-1-340460 / 350000, ext. 2353
P.O. Box 11-0236 / Internal Audit Dept.
Beirut, Lebanon
www.aub.edu.lb
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron Gula" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, March 14, 2008 2:47 AM
Subject: Re: Nessus: no vulns in Windows95?


> Riemer Brouwer wrote:
>> Thanks for the answer. Just wondering, though: assuming other scanning
>> tools
>> also fail to pick up on Windows95, downgrading might be a good security
>> move
>> as it will prevent you from being found by the baddies :-)
>
> That comment is sort of off topic for the Nessus list.
>
> Downgrading to Win95 might keep you safe from the worms and bot herders
> looking for XP desktops and modern browsers, but if you really want to
> lock
> down a web server or file server, modern OSes have much more to offer
> there.
>
> Ron Gula
> Tenable Network Security
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nessus mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://mail.nessus.org/mailman/listinfo/nessus
>

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