Last Updated on December 3, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
I had a client I hadn’t heard from in a long time give me a call.
He had previously used a workstation as a sort of ‘server’. That machine died so he purchased a Dell Server running Server 2003. He realized as he was setting it up that he was in way over his head.
When I came out I found that the machine was pretty much wide open to any hackers. First of all, none of the workstations are running an antivirus app. That leaves them open as tools for potential hackers of course. The server was set to run some services that it definitely didn’t need: FTP, Web Server and SMTP. Any one of those could be exploited. Finally, the server itself was not running any type of anti virus.
My guess is that we may start to see more of this in the future, especially in a tight economy. There are a lot of business people out there who can maintain peer to peer networks. However, there are few who understand the implications of running a server.