Security issues for the world wide web

The world wide web is a remarkably powerful medium of communication, but like most interesting things in life, it is not without dangers. For example,

• Got a macintosh? Click here to infect your machine with a virus.
• Got a PC running Microsoft Windows? Click here to infect your machine with a virus.
• Got a UNIX machine running xv or ghostscript? Click here to infect your machine with a virus.
• Click here to defeat the access control on your UNIX Machine.
• Click here to remove all of your files.
• Or, click here to fill your disk systems with so much stuff that the machine crashes.
• Click here to launch an attack on your machine via email.
• Click here to flood your network with so many packets that the whole thing goes belly up.
• Click here to be forever hounded by email from telemarketers.

Do you believe that all of these can be done?

Perhaps you wish to attack someone else's machine. Many things are possible, as more people found out with the recent release of SATAN on the Internet. For example, a machine is vulnerable if it is running an old version of NCSA httpd or sendmail or smail or majordomo or in.telnetd or many other buggy pieces of software. Hackers know of bugs for essentially every kind of machine out there. Now that personal computers are becoming networked to the Internet (rather than just UNIX machines), there will be even better targets for them in the future.

As a demonstration, simply fill in a command that you wish to run and the name of the machine that you want to run it on:

Command:  
Machine:  
Then click here: 

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