Debian now distributing cracking tools
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In comp.os.linux.advocacy, DFS wrote on Wed, 17 May 2006 13:59:54 -0400
And remember, security by obscurity (in this case, of the packets going across the 'Net) is always the best solution.
Not.
I still remember the foofooraw about Windows XP raw sockets. So, apparently, does Google, which coughed up:
Microsoft endurece su pol’tica contra los Windows piratas Un programa instalado en el ordenador recordar‡ peri—dicamente...
among others. At present, the concerns appear a bit overblown, and
makes the point that it is apparently fairly simple to modify the stack to support raw sockets, so Win2000 is hardly the first version of Windows to have this capability.
This "nuclear threat" therefore has been around for awhile. As far as I can tell, the Internet's not quite dead yet.
A friend brought it up the other day asking me if I hated Microsoft (I refused to consider windows for a new machine I had purchased). Forced me to think about some of my atbreastudes...
And does it really matter? The truly deranged hacker can probably develop a program that fits on the boot sector of a floppy and talks directly to the NIC. This is very old school of course but might be useful in certain specialized applications, such as memory testing or network stress flooding.
(It's not too difficult under Linux, either, if one has administrator access. Of course, the likelihood of raw packets getting out of the switch is probably next to nil, unless they are formatted properly.)
-- Windows Vista. Because it's time to refresh your hardware. Trust us.