Are You Secure?
So, the question I’m asking you is Are You Hackable? If you read the following, you should get a good idea whether your computer is secure or not. People say that any person is hackable, which I do not agree with. There are certain standards you must meet to be hacked. I am not talking about remote crashing and such, I am talking about getting rooted. That is much more worse then just a simple error saying you must restart etc. Which can just be patched. Keep in mind, this is not talking about Web Server side hacking.
Windows 95/98/ME
Well, as we all know it, these are by far the worst Windows off of the 9x system ever made. The problem with Windows 9X is the way the kernel processes data with the CPU. Instead of just ending a task, closing it out, terminating it, freeing any possibility of lockup from that program, it will instead continue processing the data, eventually killing your RAM and the whole PC will either blue error screen about “Your computer is busy, press any button to continue.” or just straight up lockup. Another bad thing about Win9x is the authentication is uses to protect the PC from anyone logging on. There really is no protection at all. Simple cancel from the login box, delete the users .pwl file and re-make it if you really must. Another, is the fact it is based off of FAT32. I will cover this is a new article some time.
Where 9x lacks stability, it increase in security. Why do I say this? Because Win9X does not come with any remote services installed by default. Services can allow an attacker methods of getting inside of the PC, hence open port. If you do not have File Sharing Enabled through NetBIOS, then you should not worry about being rooted by a direct attack.
1) Right click on My Network Places
2) File and Print Sharing
3) Uncheck mark anything selected, to make sure this is not enabled.
4) Remove the File sharing protocol from the list.
I can not stress more that if you have NetBIOS enabled, and shared files out, a user may simple issue \\YOURIP and see the shared files, if prompted for a password there are many tools out there to brute force the SMB Logins. A lot of Win9x users do not supply strong passwords. So, always keep a good password if you have NetBIOS enabled. With Windows 9X, you ONLY must supply a password, there are no need for any usernames. This is another reason the authentication is horrible. There has been known exploits, such as the short password vulnerability where the user only needed to supply like the first 3 digits of the password and they have access.
Windows 2000/XP
The most stable and reliable Windows OS would have to be anything based off of the NT kernel. Being Windows 2000/XP/2003, if you startup you will notice “Built off NT technology.” Which is a good thing. When I mentioned how 9X does not kill the process directly from the memory, making it unstable, win2k/XP allow this process to be killed, once killed it is directly taken out of the memory and RAM is freed up. Also, the priority of the CPU Usage is not randomly thrown around to each process, like in Win9X. You may actually set the priority for how much CPU Usage you want the application to consume.
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Windows 95/98/ME
Well, as we all know it, these are by far the worst Windows off of the 9x system ever made. The problem with Windows 9X is the way the kernel processes data with the CPU. Instead of just ending a task, closing it out, terminating it, freeing any possibility of lockup from that program, it will instead continue processing the data, eventually killing your RAM and the whole PC will either blue error screen about “Your computer is busy, press any button to continue.” or just straight up lockup. Another bad thing about Win9x is the authentication is uses to protect the PC from anyone logging on. There really is no protection at all. Simple cancel from the login box, delete the users .pwl file and re-make it if you really must. Another, is the fact it is based off of FAT32. I will cover this is a new article some time.
Where 9x lacks stability, it increase in security. Why do I say this? Because Win9X does not come with any remote services installed by default. Services can allow an attacker methods of getting inside of the PC, hence open port. If you do not have File Sharing Enabled through NetBIOS, then you should not worry about being rooted by a direct attack.
1) Right click on My Network Places
2) File and Print Sharing
3) Uncheck mark anything selected, to make sure this is not enabled.
4) Remove the File sharing protocol from the list.
I can not stress more that if you have NetBIOS enabled, and shared files out, a user may simple issue \\YOURIP and see the shared files, if prompted for a password there are many tools out there to brute force the SMB Logins. A lot of Win9x users do not supply strong passwords. So, always keep a good password if you have NetBIOS enabled. With Windows 9X, you ONLY must supply a password, there are no need for any usernames. This is another reason the authentication is horrible. There has been known exploits, such as the short password vulnerability where the user only needed to supply like the first 3 digits of the password and they have access.
Windows 2000/XP
The most stable and reliable Windows OS would have to be anything based off of the NT kernel. Being Windows 2000/XP/2003, if you startup you will notice “Built off NT technology.” Which is a good thing. When I mentioned how 9X does not kill the process directly from the memory, making it unstable, win2k/XP allow this process to be killed, once killed it is directly taken out of the memory and RAM is freed up. Also, the priority of the CPU Usage is not randomly thrown around to each process, like in Win9X. You may actually set the priority for how much CPU Usage you want the application to consume.
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