Lab Notes

USA Today has a story describing a honey pot project to test network vulnerabilities on different operating systems. A Windows XP machine running Service Pack 1 with no additional patches was compromised within four minutes of being placed on the internet. Machines running Windows XP SP2, Linspire, and Mac OS X avoided being compromised despite repeated break-in attempts. Simply installing a free firewall on the Windows XP SP1 machine provided the security needed to keep out attackers. "The firewalls did their job," says [Ryan Russell, co-author of the study]. "If you can't get to them, you can't attack them."