BBC using honeypot to expose online attacks

floppywhopper · 10-08-2006, 08:33 PM

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5414502.stm

Basically the BBC used an exposed Win XP machine
to see how many attacks it would suffer
it's worth reading
just to understand how often a computer
will experience a deliberate attack while on the net

regards
floppy

rickh · 10-08-2006, 08:44 PM

Most of these stories I read in the mainstream press, are silly scare tactics written by people who don't understand the issues involved and who present them in a form to be consumed by people who understand even less. This one is a straight-shooter. I'm not convinced the writer is a techie, but he seems to have gotten the facts correctly from people who obviously do understand them.

floppywhopper · 10-08-2006, 09:02 PM

The main reason I posted this is to help newbies understand the importance of running a secure system - even if it is *nix based.

And though I haven't sen it for a while, from time to time someone will come on wondering why cruising the internet while running as root on an unsecured system is a bad idea .....

And then there are the MS trolls.

My own firewall ( IPCop ) would certainly back up what the BBC is saying - one only has to look at the logs

regards
floppy