Automated software patching is almost part-and-parcel of booting up a PC these days. If it’s not Windows, its Firefox, Adobe or someone else that wants to patch a security issue. It’s annoying and carries some risk in itself but it’s a necessary part of online life and, for a normal consumer, shouldn’t be disabled or ignored. Before I started my Pro-blogging life I was a security architect and the process of risk analysis is now burned deep into my brain. I can’t help but analyse a security report and the latest one that has been demonstrated by Rise Security on an Eee PC has me more worried than usual.
If you’re are at home behind your broadband router, you’re probably fine. Unless you have all ‘ports’ forwarded to your EeePC automatically, it’s unlikely that someone from outside will be able to see your PC and perform the exploit. If you’re using the Eee PC in a public place though you need to be more careful because if you’re using a hotspot, you’re probably vulnerable and if I was a hacker, I’d be pretty happy to see the situation in the image here!
- The Eee PC users are new, consumer-level users that probably don’t know about the risk.
- Eee PCs are highly portable and more likely than most PCs to appear in a public place.
- You know that most Eee PC’s will still be running the default, vulnerable software.
- An Eee PC is very easy to identify. Its the small one!
- There a probably near to half a million of them out there now.
- Scanning hundreds of thousands of IP addresses for the exploit is simple.
IT Exhibitions and Starbucks would be the places I’d hang around and if I really want to guarantee a valuable hack I’d be buying a ticket to CeBIT! If you’re taking your Eee PC to CeBIT, please either disable samba or ban yourself from using a hotspot.
Over time, every OS will become vulnerable so it’s important to ensure that your OS provider is committed to pushing out security updates. I’ve read that Xandros isn’t as pro-active as others at pushing out security updates but I’m sure Xandros and ASUS will react quickly in this case because of the publicity factor. In case they don’t, please make sure you enable a personal firewall (is there one on the Eee PC? If not your Google keywords are iptables, firestarter) or you disable the Samba server deamon. For detailed info and a user-generated patch, see this helpful eeeuser forum thread.
Best solution – get an HSDPA flat-rate and use that to connect to the Internet. The very nature of the network architecture (in most, if not all cases, NAT, private IP addresses and firewalls are used) means that PC server services are not visible to others.
