Question 3 - subject information security : Can you please tell me risks of expl

Question

Question 3 - subject information security : Can you please tell me risks of exploiting ports that are open, closed or filtered?
ok so here i explain more:

The ports are open or closed or filtered. I need to give an explanation of the risks of exploiting those ports.
For example in the first case i have 5 open ports and 94 are filtered. What are the risks of exploiting the open ones? the service they are in are echo,ftp,ssh, telnet, finger, http. and the ports are all named tcp.
please asnwer me as soon as possible i will give you lots of points to everyone

Thanks

Explanation / Answer

Well, for starters, closed and filtered ports usually represent the least of your security concerns as it is much more difficult to gain access to the system. Closed usually sends a response back to the person scanning your ports telling you that its closed, whereas filtered often does not respond at all. Open ports have two main security concerns: security issues with the OS (this can be a issue with closed ports, but thats probably more detail than you want) and security concerns with the program delivering the service. As for your actual services: echo is not a huge issue as long as you have a sound implementation of it, as it just returns the data you give it, without more information, I would assume that there could be issues like buffer overflow that might be a security concern but once again I would need more info. I suppose you could flood echo to cause some level of DoS (denial of service) ftp is considered far less secure, and requires alot more work to lock down from anonymous connections, lack of logs, and a vast amount of other things, If you are interested you can get a basic idea of what someone should do here: http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Secure_FTP_Server.html ssh is a little better, although depending on the service (ssh daemon) you are running exploits exist that would quickly compromise your machine. Some basic things you can do to lock down SSH are require strong passwords, kill connections after too many bad attempts and delays between password retrys. (bruteforcing) Also, make sure your key stays safe. Telnet is a disaster all around for security in my opinion, passwords are sent over plaintext, people can steal your session with some basic ARP spoofing, and the best part of all this is if that machine runs ssh and telnet, you telnet in, and ssh out to somewhere else, and if someone is listening in, they now have your ssh password too! finger... phew, almost done. Now finger is really neat, think of it as a free phonebook, you can look up all the people who have accounts tied to that finger database (usually just the machine/network) now suppose someone telnets in, and uses some basic skills with finger, they now have full names, possibly phone numbers, email and whatever else is in their plan file. For people who harvest information, this is a goldmine, so be careful who you give access to finger to. Ok, finally http. The bigest thing to be careful of is make sure the service that runs http is secure, because if it does not, you are toast from the get-go. Hopefully I interpreted your question right.

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