3 ms·

I am not talking about insane cryptic obfuscation, i am simply stating that advertising services by publicly naming your server what it runs is flat out n3wb st

• xenophonf 12y ago
  And my point is that public-facing services already advertise all kinds of information about themselves. Obscure codenames won't make attacks harder to run, while they will significantly increase the level of effort on the part of your sysadmins. Infosec is all about cost-benefit analysis and risk reduction, right? Well, in my view the administrative overhead costs of a naming convention like "Star Trek characters" outweigh the supposed security benefits. I will grant you that it may come down to differences in our threat models. In my case attacks are impersonal - it's the malware or botnet /du jour/ that I have to deal with on a regular basis, versus the kind of APT facing journalists, civil rights organizations, or militaries. Even then I'm not sure that naming conventions that leak less information than a basic port scan will slow APT down. Too, the administrative overhead caused by forcing sysadmins to constantly go to a CMDB just to do basic troubleshooting might be a cost targetted organizations would be willing to pay. In my case, we run really, really lean, so we do what we can to make our I.T. services self-documenting (naming and numbering conventions that have meaning across multiple network layers).