sandeep

I'm living in the dorms here at school, and one of the popular apps around is mp3 voyeur, which basically scans the internal network for shared files of a specified type.

One question that the using of this software has brought up with me, is what exactly is accessible from both within the network, and outside of it.

I'm running windows 2000 professional, which I have come to know and trust, but I really haven't used much of the networking tools, since I've never really been part of a big network.

Are there any tools, either within windows, or apps that I could install that would show me what parts of my computer would show up in a search like mp3 voyeur, or sharescan or something similar?

Also, scans of network security in general would be appriciated as well.

numist

er... come to #tfp and ask meff or merk (or maybe they'll post) but from there they can scan your network externally and see whats open. There's a lot of tools, but to see whats acessible from outside your network you need to be....outside your network...

Network security is a difficult beast, its really not that bad to have ports open, just make sure they are password protected at the least if you are worried about unauthorized access..

Peetster

Problem there is that it isn't your network. Scanning someone else's network without their permission starts to get legally questionable. Probing other nodes on your network could get you in hot water.

Fallon

Heh, I just started running a book titled Hacker's Challenge. It's an incident response book.
General Personal Comp. Security
Just general security advice for anyone. Now, just for the first chapter I read, here's something that you might want to do. If you're using the admin/owner account, create a new account and use that instead. This is like the number 1 rule on any OS. Now that you've done that, goto the system32 dir, if you don't know what a command is, either look it up, or make it only usable by the admin only.

What you might wanna do is talk with some of the IT people and tell them you're nervous about what you were saying. Ask them what they'd suggest. If they can't help ya, then look around for some tutorials and programs to secure your computer.

These are all pretty common tips, as soon as I get further in my book, I'll tell ya other ways in that people might hack into a persons computer so that you can defend yourself. Hopefully...

Pragma

Fallon: I've got Hacker's Challenge 1 and 2 - both are excellent books for network security forensics - as well as teaching network security at decent level.

As to sandeep, first thing you'll want to do is open up Computer Manager and go to Shared Folders and see what you're sharing. Also while you're in there, disable any users that you don't actually need (ie: your account should be the only user that needs to be enabled).

After that, go grab a firewall (Tiny Personal Firewall, Zone Alarm, etc.) and work on configuring that. By default, without any of that stuff, you're not terribly insecure, as long as you keep up to date on WindowsUpdate patches, but you've still got some open places. After setting up a firewall and doing other stuff, you're a bit more protected.

__________________
Eat antimatter, Posleen-boy!

dragonhawk

Well, if you really want to know, try

Nessus
http://www.nessus.org/ (if you have access to a linux system on the network)

Ethereal (a sniffer program, Windows or Linux)
http://www.ethereal.com/

Retina (you can download a demo) (Windows)
http://www.eeye.com/html/Products/Retina/


Ethereal (a sniffer program, Windows or Linux)
http://www.ethereal.com/

Snort (Intrusion Detection, incase someone is trying to hack your system, Linux or Windows)
www.snort.org

Retina is the only one that costs money, and Nessuss is close to it and free, but Nessuss only runs on Unix / Linux type stuff.

Use these to scan your computer. Retina nad Nessuss will give you a guide of what it found and if it is a security hole, how to fix it.

__________________
----------------------------------------------
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

charliex

run NetBrute on your own ip address it'll show whats accessible admin or otherwise.

nmap is alaso a good security scanner

sandeep

I'm not really scared or nervous, as much as I am curious.

I'll check out those tools. Thanks for the links and advice guys.

silenced

I completely agree with retina, its a VERY nice program, and best part, it updates everytime its started to see if new security holes have been found. I am not sure about the other appz but thanks dragonhawk for the list, I'll also check them out.

__________________
I am jack's broken heart

poof

<a href="http://grc.com/">One more to try.</a> Gibson will check your ip address, but, you probably are dhcp. Try it. Can't hurt.

sailor

My Sygate firewall has a little checker thing (for lack of a better description) that will check your computer. Its probably not incredibly thorough, but its better than nothing.

__________________
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
--Plato

Pragma

Gibson's port scanning, from my experience, is pretty inaccurate - but that's just my opinion on it. The rest of them, especially nmap, are very good.

__________________
Eat antimatter, Posleen-boy!