Turn Off Hidden Shares
With all the attention that spyware, phishing, e-mails, and corporate hackers get on any given day, we mustn’t forget that good ol’ Windows itself can be the source of a security hole. It turns out that Vista has a back door that could permit someone else to read any file on your hard drive, and the same problem exists in Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP. But don’t expect a fix anytime soon. This bug is a “feature.”
Before you can copy files from one PC to another on your network, you need to share the folder containing the files. That’s contrary to conventional wisdom, which holds that you should share only those folders you want made public and keep everything else unshared.
Enter Administrative Shares, which let network administrators perform maintenance remotely. The feature—which is turned on by default works by sharing your entire hard drive, and then hiding the share by adding a $ character as a suffix. But unless you’re in a corporate environment, you have nothing to gain by leaving this back door open and everything to lose. (more…)
