Networking / Beginners

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Myth 2: If We Hide It, they Not Find It

If only we had a dime for every time we have seen someone try to hide their system... Hiding the system so rarely helps. Some examples are in order. For instance, some people advocate turning off SSID broadcast in wireless networks. Not only does this mean you now have a network that is not compliant with the standard, your clients will also prefer a rogue network with the same name over the legitimate one. Oh, and it takes only a few minutes to actually find the network anyway, given the proper tools. Another example is changing the banners on your Web site so the bad guys will not know it is running IIS. First, it is relatively simple to figure out what the Web site is running anyway. Second, most of the bad guys are not smart enough to do that, so they just try all the exploits, including the IIS ones. Yet another one is renaming the Administrator account. It is a matter of a couple of API calls to find the real name. Our favorite is when administrators use Group Policy to rename the Administrator account. They now have an account called Janitor3, with a comment of "Built-in account for administering the computer/domain." This is not really likely to fool anyone.

Renaming or hiding things is generally speaking much more likely to break applications than it is to actually stop an attack. Attackers know that administrators rename things, and go look for the real name first. Poorly written applications assume the Program Files directory is in a particular place, that the Administrator account has a particular name depending on region, and so on. Those applications will now break. Arguably, they were already broken, but the result is that they no longer function.