On Monday 28 May 2007 13:52, Michael S. Dunsavage wrote: > I'm confused. Can someone sum this up for me? I'm from USA.
One means of assessing a system's security against break-in attempts that originate outside the machine and use the Internet (or, more precisely, an IP-based protocol or, simply, IP packets as such) as the avenue of attack is to "scan" the IP ports of a host's IP address(es). This means to attempt to establish connections or elicit some kind of response by sending test packets to the subject system. As it turns out, this activity is very similar to those employed in break-in attempts themselves, for the obvious reason. Judging from what the OP wrote, posessing software which can perform such scans has been made illegal in Germany. If that's an accurate characterization, then this law is going to be a problem, both for diligent, security-conscious system administrators and for anyone trying to enforce it, since even without purpose-built port-scanning software, one can still pretty easily cobble together some scripts to perform the same essential tests. Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
