Re: Civil Disobedience

[dan.ellis () sophos com]

On 10/15/2001 05:56:56 PM ethan wrote:

> I can't begin to count the number of times that visitors to our site,
> whom just got that spiffy new firewall on their windows box, have
> emailed me, cc'd to the FBI, our upstream, and anyone else they can
> think of claiming our servers were "breaking into" their machine.

It's a shame these 'spiffy new firewalls' don't come packaged with at
least a small amount of clue under the shrinkwrap. Having somebody
retrieve files via FTP from your server, and then send you, your
upstream etc the logs showing you trying to *ahem* 'hack' them on
the auth port and, astoundingly, the ftp-data port really goes to show
how over-paranoid and hysterical people can get.

> Any newbie
> with a firewall that suspects something is going to become a terrorist
> spotter.

I'd have to agree that the reporting of every small incident leads to
a complete loss of perspective for some people.


--
Dan Ellis, Software Engineer                              Sophos Anti-Virus
email: dan.ellis () sophos com                           http://www.sophos.com
US Support: +1 888 SOPHOS 9                     UK Support: +44 1235 559933