What do net attackers look for?

[Mike Oliver]

Quoting Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>:

> On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 05:30:06PM -0500, Mike Oliver wrote:
>> I don't really want to know all the gory details.  I'm mostly interested
>> in the answer to the direct question:  If an attacker can guess your
>> password
>> and your firewall is off, but you haven't turned on any of the obvious
>> daemons, what is the risk level?
>
> I guess it depends if your kernel has any security holes in itself.  In
> general though if no services are listening, it is quite secure.

OK, so I've checked ssh, rsh, telnet, ftp; they're all off.  Are there
any others?  BTW I googled for "ubuntu kernel vulnerability" or some such
and it seems that there was one that was just patched, but it didn't seem
terribly relevant because the attacker had to be "local", and all it did
was give him root access, which if he could become "local", as I understand
it, he would have anyway through sudo (assuming he got the local access
through knowing the password).


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