Article:		Homemade Dot-Mac with OS X
Subject:		Re: This article is DANGEROUS!
Date:		2005-01-17 09:14:23
From:		agraham999
Response to: This article is DANGEROUS!
I'm sorry you were the victim of an attack...there are some real crappy people oout there, but I would point out that at the end of this piece it mentions Part 2 and setting up a Firewall. From Part 2: "The importance of this is simply to keep private information private and keep nasty people from nefarious tasks...A firewall is a security measure to prevent unwanted users from gaining access to a LAN (Local Area Network). Usually, a firewall consists of one computer that acts as a gateway to the Internet. All Internet traffic must pass through that computer." ...plus much more. Again I'm sorry this happened to you, but this piece was intended to be read in two installments. I've been running my Homemade Dot Mac server for two years and I've never had a hacker penetrate my network...however as with anything...that is possible. Even browsing the web can put a computer at risk. One thing you might look at is creating a account on your machine that is dedicated to hosting, with limited permissions and access to other portions of your machine. Then just made a copy of that account on CD in case you ever have to restore it. And don't forget a firewall. Wish you the best. Alan

Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1.

• Re: This article is DANGEROUS!
  2006-02-11 03:03:23  Donaldo [View]
  
  
  What this article really should have mentioned was to get an up-to-date version of Apache. Apache is very secure. It sounds however like the hacker acquired priveleges greater than what should be allocated to Apache, suggesting that Apple's out-of-the-box configuration of Apache for your system, npenny, was poor. This is in addition to your Apache being out-of-date.
  
  Alan: A firewall wouldn't have helped if npenny's computer was compromised through Apache, which based on what he mentioned in his post, it probably was.
  
  Readers: A firewall only blocks other systems on your network from accessing not-explicitly-exposed applications and services running on your system. This way every application is by default inaccessible, and if there is a vulnerability in one of them, they cannot be accessed by anyone on the other side of your firewall. If you want people to access your web server or any other application or service, then you must expose it to the internet, nullifying the effect of the firewall for that particular application / service.