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Public Web servers are constantly subject to abuse and attacks. Why?

  • Must, by nature, be exposed to the outside world

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  • Defacements can cause embarrassment -- a big draw for hackers seeking attention

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  • Ideally positioned as launch points for attacks on third parties
    • Often entirely outside the firewall
    • May be co-located at a remote site and thus hard to monitor, administer, etc.
    • Require more upstream than downstream bandwidth (unlike clients). If they get it, it means more bandwidth for DoS attacks of all kinds... and lots of capacity for spamming

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  • May contain information that's of use to spammers and other abusers -- from e-mail addresses to credit card info and SSNs (stupid, but it's frequently done)

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  • "Image trollers" hunt for copyrighted  images used without permission, MP3s, etc. and can clog servers while doing so

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  • Common CGI scripts can be exploited by spammers, others