Blocking connections from telnet

Rick Stevens rstevens at vitalstream.com
Wed Mar 10 20:36:19 UTC 2004


Ajai Khattri wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Rick Stevens wrote:
> 
> 
>>And I can't stress it enough...DON'T USE TELNET if you are exposed to
>>the internet in ANY way.  Install and use ssh instead.  telnet is the
>>biggest security hole there ever was (bigger than IIS and Outlook even,
>>and that's saying a LOT!)
> 
> 
> Its scary, the number of people on this list still using telnet...

Newbies tend to use it because a) other things have "telnet interfaces"
and they want to get at them, and b) they don't understand the inherent
danger in it.

What's truly scary is that even though the vast majority of Unix/Linux
flavors default to having telnetd disabled, there are so many people
who want to enable it.  It's disabled for a very, very good reason
(the same reason that has caused fingerd, rdated and a host of others
to be disabled).
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-    I don't suffer from insanity...I enjoy every minute of it!      -
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