By Stephen Cass Computer viruses, crackers, script kiddies, worms and disgruntled employees are all enough to keep IT managers and system administrators awake at night. Even if you don't have the time or the technical savvy to keep up on every front, this should form the basis of a regular checklist.
Crackers frequently exploit known bugs in products to gain access to systems.
It's wise to keep up with Bugtraq, because the people who are looking to get into your systems certainly are. Security Focus maintains an archive of advisories and vulnerabilities, broken down by vendor and product. Beyond Bugtraq, Security Focus also offers incident reports and community forums, with specific areas devoted to Microsoft, Sun and Linux systems. Built for Linux systems, it has been recently ported to Windows. NMAP creates a detailed, automatic analysis of the Internet ports available on a target machines or networks.