Description

This article is from the comp.security.unix and comp.security.misc FAQ, by Alan J Rosenthal flaps@dgp.toronto.edu with numerous contributions by others.

01 This faq (comp.security.unix and comp.security.misc)

This is not supposed to be a statement of group consensus. This is simply
supposed to be a few VERY frequently asked questions and their answers, so
that we can snidely say "see the faq" when people ask them. The answers
supplied are supposed to be completely uncontroversial amongst people who
know what they're talking about. (My first answer might be a bit borderline
in this respect but I don't recall ever having seen a contrary opinion here.)
Except for the portscan question, in which I've attempted to present ALL of
the major views.

Contributions of questions are welcome (with or without answers); however,
the idea is that they are supposed to be things which have straightforward
answers and which we see very frequently (at least prior to their inclusion
in this document). If your answer is long, it might not belong in this
document, at least as I see the purpose of this document. For example, it is
intentional that this document doesn't contain firewall recommendations, even
though that's a frequently-asked question here. (But see the firewall faq at
http://www.interhack.net/pubs/fwfaq/)

Thanks to Juan Gallego, Lamont Granquist, and Martin Ouwehand for additional
suggestions re finding setuid files on different versions of unix. Thanks
to Dan Farmer for making me aware of cops 1.04+ (cf 1.04). Thanks to Dan
Niles and Jyrki Havia for tripwire bug details as posted to the newsgroup.
Thanks to Scott Barman for a Windows NT security book reference. Thanks to
Robert Graham for suggesting I cite his good firewall-seen.html file.
Thanks to Denis McKeon and Olaf Schreck for improvements to my bit about
editing the SATAN perl file (to avoid newbie errors).

Disclaimer: The posting of this file is not to be construed as a commitment
to provide free consulting to people I don't know. Post your questions to
the newsgroup and I might answer them there, or someone else might do it
better. (Although if you say "please send e-mail copies", I'm going to
ignore your message.)

Disclaimer 2: There ARE errors in this file, but at the time of writing, I
didn't know what they were. (If I knew, I would have fixed them.) This
document is offered on an "as-is" basis, no warranty is implied, blah blah blah.

The metafaqs say you should choose a random day of the month to post monthly
faqs on, so I just used random() and got the number 22 (I don't think it's
necessary for it to be a cryptographic random number).

Yes, I know that syntactically, these are not all "questions".

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