🚀 go-pugleaf

Familiarity is a dangerous thing.  Seems like many of you have forgotten what
it is like not to be familiar with computer security issues.

Working on it a few hours a week, Joe Average has been keeping a box up and
running for a while.  Joe's boss says it sure would be nice to do a little
work from home, so Joe buys a couple of modems.  He reads all the manuals for
the box and for the modems, and even calls the customer service number for
the box to double check everything he's done.  A couple days later they have
dail-in access to their box.  What has Joe done wrong?  He read all the
vendor's documentation and even called the vendor to double check, and some
of you think it's Joe's fault when his computer is broken into?

You tell him to read books, but why should he bother?  Joe's site isn't
interested in their computer being finely tuned.  They just want it to stay
up and running, which it already is.  Besides, Joe only works a sysadmin a
few hours a week.  He's got more important things to do than read third-party
books.  As far as passwords go, sure everyone there uses easy ones.  Why not?
It's a small site and everybody knows everybody else.  As far as the modems
go, no one else even knows that they have them, much less the phone numbers.

Try seeing it from Joe's perspective before you flame him.

--
Jeff Stehman			Systems Staff, G-18A Jordan
stehman@cs.clemson.edu		Dept. of Computer Science
(803)656-2639			Clemson University