Skip to Main Content
Network Security Hacks
book

Network Security Hacks

by Andrew Lockhart
April 2004
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
320 pages
9h 10m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Network Security Hacks

Disable Default Shares

Stop sharing all your files with the world.

By default, Windows enables sharing for each logical disk on your system (C$ for the C drive) in addition to another share called ADMIN$ for the %SystemRoot% directory (e.g., C:\WINNT). Although this is accessible only to Administrators, it is wise to disable these shares (if at all possible) since they still present a potential security hole.

To disable these shares, open the Registry by running regedit.exe and then find the HKey_Local_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters key.

If you’re using Windows 2000 workstation, add an AutoShareWks DWORD key with the value of 0 (as shown in Figure 2-5) by clicking Edit New DWORD Value. For Windows 2000 Server, add an AutoShareServer key with a value of 0. When you’re done editing the Registry, restart Windows for the change to take effect.

Adding an AutoShareWks registry key

Figure 2-5. Adding an AutoShareWks registry key

After Windows has finished loading, you can verify that the default shares no longer exist by running net share:

C:\>net share

Share name   Resource                    Remark

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
IPC$         Remote IPC                  The command completed successfully.

Before doing this, you should be sure that disabling these shares will not negatively affect your environment. Lack of these shares can cause some system management software—such as HFNetChk ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Linux: Powerful Server Administration

Linux: Powerful Server Administration

Uday Sawant, Oliver Pelz, Jonathan Hobson, William Leemans

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596006438Catalog PageErrata