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Vulnerability Assessment Details

Chargen

Vulnerability Assessment Summary
Searches for the existence of chargen

Detailed Explanation for this Vulnerability Assessment

Summary :

The remote host is running a 'chargen' service.

Description :

When contacted, chargen responds with some random characters (something
like all the characters in the alphabet in a row). When contacted via UDP, it
will respond with a single UDP packet. When contacted via TCP, it will
continue spewing characters until the client closes the connection.

The purpose of this service was to mostly to test the TCP/IP protocol
by itself, to make sure that all the packets were arriving at their
destination unaltered. It is unused these days, so it is suggested
you disable it, as a possible hacker may use it to set up an attack against
this host, or against a third party host using this host as a relay.

An easy attack is 'ping-pong' in which a possible hacker spoofs a packet between
two machines running chargen. This will cause them to spew characters at
each other, slowing the machines down and saturating the network.

Solution :

- Under Unix systems, comment out the 'chargen' line in /etc/inetd.conf
and restart the inetd process

- Under Windows systems, set the following registry keys to 0 :
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\SimpTCP\Parameters\EnableTcpChargen
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\SimpTCP\Parameters\EnableUdpChargen

Then launch cmd.exe and type :

net stop simptcp
net start simptcp

To restart the service.

Network Security Threat Level:

Low / CVSS Base Score : 2
(AV:R/AC:L/Au:NR/C:N/A:P/I:N/B:N)

Networks Security ID:

Vulnerability Assessment Copyright: This script is Copyright (C) 1999 Mathieu Perrin

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