Re: Denial of Service attacks on Mac OS [Classic]?
Re: Denial of Service attacks on Mac OS [Classic]?
- Subject: Re: Denial of Service attacks on Mac OS [Classic]?
- From: Glenn Anderson <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 10:41:00 +1300
Hi gang.
Here's a slightly different type of question for you. A customer of our
internet file transfer product is getting flack from his corporate IT
department about putting a Mac on their network that is accessible from the
Internet. Their objections are somewhat vague but they are claiming that
Macs are more prone to DoS attacks than a Windows box.
My experience with corporate IT people is they don't know what they
are talking about when it comes to Macs, so they are always vague.
The real reason they don't want a Mac on their network is because it
exposes just how unnecessary their jobs are.
This seems doubtful to me but I need some ammo I can fire back to counter
their claims. Can any one point me to some useful documents or information?
My recommendation is to just say something like "that was fixed in
Mac OS 9.1" in an authoritative manner when the IT people make their
vague claim. As they don't know what they are taking about, they
won't be able to refute that. If they persist, ask them to come up
with the details of the specific exploits they are concerned about.
I'm assuming that since OT is based on the Mentat MPS product that it shares
the same problems as other MPS-based products such as NetWare, HP-UX, IBM
AIX, Compaq Tru64 Unix, etc.
I recall an issue with Mac OS 9.0 (or one of the 9.0.x versions)
where Macs could be exploited as DoS attack amplifiers. MacTCP and
some of the early 1.x versions of Open Transport are also vulnerable
to the Land Attack and on some systems the Ping of Death. Other than
that, I don't believe Macs are any more prone to DoS attacks than any
other platform. If anything, Macs are less prone to DoS attacks, as
DoS attacks is a wide ranging category covering things like remotely
crashing the machine (the Ping of Death and the Land Attack),
breaking in to the machine and installing a DoS attack amplifier (I
have never heard of this happening on a Mac, it happens all the time
on Windows boxes), and being at the receiving end of a DoS attack
caused by large volumes of packets (not much can be done about that
on any platform).
Glenn.