heads up, folks: random vnc (remote desktop) attempts

[Chris Mohler]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 4:09 PM, H.S. <hs.samix at gmail.com> wrote:
> Norberto Bensa wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 7:55 PM, H.S. <hs.samix at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> So the remote user first has to expect to get the desktop, on the right
>>> OS (windows, mac, Linux), the right kernel and architecture and without
>>> the security updates to get into the system to fiddle with rootkits.
>>
>> Yeah. Pretty much 99.995% of the computers around the world. Scary eh? :-)
>>
>
> I was just thinking that the person has to be extremely suspicious if
> some slackness is found in VNC configuration on Windows than on, say, a
> FreeBSD or a GNU/Linux system.

A false sense of security there, IMO.  What's to prevent installing
some software in ~/.something/somewhere or /tmp/somewhere that's doing
<insert_something_dodgy_here>?  Maybe listening on certain ports,
scanning your LAN for other targets, sending spam, logging keystrokes,
etc.  Even without getting rooted, leaving VNC (or any other network
service) wide-open is a recipe for disaster - regardless of OS.

Chris