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Re: Fwd: PLEASE HELP! mail not working :(



Salut, Nino,

On Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:56:52 +0200, Nino on NetBSD 4.0 wrote:
> Moreover, I have come to the conclusion that "the NetBSD guide" needs
> a rewrite for those of us who just need a "text-only desktop". No
> RAID, NO servers of any kind (besides MAYBE anonymous ftp), no
> security theories, you assume you are merely an unimportant target
> behind a firewall/other network. All you want to do is set up a

I don't think you will understand this, but this is actually a false
impression. Nowadays breaking into computers is rarely governed by
interests in the data contained on the computers (besides the address
book ;) but more by the bandwidth. And that doesn't mean you're
unlikely to be broken into behind your 64kbps line.

What I mean is SPAM. SPAM is a big business nowadays, companies are
paying spammers thousands of dollars, and then the spammers will
contact their networks of bots and viruses running on various Windows
workstations, Linux servers and other devices running whatever
vulnerable software you can think of. Then, these devices start to send
out SPAM.

Same goes for DDoS attacks. Those are actually sold for a few thousand
bucks and are also driven by zombie botnets which consist of bots
running on computers of people who did not care to install security
updates.

SPAM and automatted attacks which don't care about who the hell the
target is and if it might contain interesting data are the new big
threat scenario. Thus, the argument "I am not interesting" is no longer
valid. If you don't care about security, well, you're screwed.

                                Tonnerre

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