Hacking For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. War Dialing

In This Chapter

• Controlling dialup access

• Testing for war dialing weaknesses

• Preventing war dialing

War dialing — the act of using a computer to scan other computers automatically for accessible modems — was made popular in the 1983 movie WarGames. War dialing seems old-fashioned and less sexy than other hacking techniques these days; however, it's still a very critical test to run against your network. This chapter shows how to test for war dialing vulnerabilities and outlines countermeasures to help keep your network from being victimized.

Modem Safety

It's amazing how often end users and careless network administrators connect modems to computers inside the network. Some companies spend an astonishing amount of money and effort to roll out intrusion prevention software, application firewalls, and forensics protection tools while ignoring that an unsecured modem on the network can render that protection worthless.

Modems are still on today's networks because of leftover remote access servers (RAS) that provide remote connectivity into the corporate network. Many network administrators — hesitant to deploy a VPN, Citrix, or other remote access solution — still have modems on their servers and other hosts for other reasons, such as for administering the network, troubleshooting problems remotely, and even providing connectivity to remote offices. Some network administrators have legitimate modems installed for third-party monitoring purposes and business continuity; ...