Computerworld - I was battling yet another worm infestation this week when it came to my attention that our FTP server might be allowing visitors to download illegal copies of Windows.
As for the worms, we've had one after another, and all of them so far have taken advantage of a well-known Windows vulnerability for which Microsoft has already issued a patch. Unfortunately, until we deploy an effective patch management infrastructure to the entire organization and partition off network segments that can't be patched in a timely manner (specifically our engineering labs), we'll continue to have to attend to these outbreaks.
Eventually, I hope to convince upper management to support my proposed patch management and network segmentation deployment. But we're so busy fighting the worms that we've had little time to document their negative effects. And until we gather some meaningful historical data, it's difficult to build a decent business case.
Piracy Suspected
This week, an alarming e-mail from one of our product marketing managers also took up quite a bit of my time. He had noticed a file named en-win2k-pro.iso in the public, outgoing directory on one of our file transfer protocol servers. The file name appeared to be an installation image of the Windows 2000 Professional operating system.
The .iso extension indicates a file that contains the complete image of a CD-ROM. We often use image files when transferring CD images over the Internet, and they can be used to make software distributions available for download.
Once you have the .iso image, it's easy to restore the image to a CD-ROM. Doing that with the en-win2k-pro.iso file would essentially create a pirated Windows distribution CD-ROM. All you need then is a license key to turn it on. Not good.
I walked over to the offices of our Unix FTP server systems administrators and asked one of them to log on for me. Sure enough, the file was residing in the outgoing directory. Its size, at about 420MB, matched the size of a Windows 2000 Professional distribution copy. The presence of such an image could get my company into hot water for illegally distributing licensed software.
The public could freely download the image, but the FTP server was configured in such a way that external users, who access the server as anonymous users, couldn't have uploaded the file. Uploads from the public can be directed only to the incoming directory. The only people who can upload to the outgoing directory are users with valid administrative accounts on the server. That meant
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