[geeks] Now GEEKS [rescue] Replacing ... laptop firewalls

[Jonathan J. M. Katz]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 10:31 AM, Ray Arachelian <ray at arachelian.com> wrote:
> A local firewall on your desktop/laptop/workstation, being something you
> yourself control is very useful and can prevent a lot of other security
> issues, especially when you're traveling and using hotel wifi or whatever.

I moved this thread to geeks because of some recent events that I
wanted to share.

I was bored one night in my hotel and broke out Nessus. Just a simple
scan of the hotel class C (192.168.x.0/24.) I've been staying in this
hotel since January.

I was floored. Things I found included...
... laptops that were wide open (Macs and PCs both.) Not just
unpatched XP, but wide-open anonymous shares and client software with
default login privs posted: http://vote4katz.com/?p=70
... hotel workstations that were connected to corporate hotel networks
on the same "open" LAN that guests are on (no segmenting.)

I'm debating the ethics of breaking out snort on my laptop (on the
wired guest network) not to be evil, just to see what worm activity
exists.