To: Sheldon C. who wrote (2451 ) 12/3/1997 7:29:00 PM From: Sheldon C. Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 4676
Is there a software engineer in the house? While flying to Florida last week, I was reading BYTE Magazine. I am not a technician, so much was not fully understandable. However, I did learn that there are a great many security problems with Windows NT. Many of them revolve around the password system. NT has a the capacity for a 14 letter/number password. However, if you are on a system that uses Windows 95 and/or microsoft Lan software, you are limited to 8 characters. Apparently this is very easy to hack into. BYTE considered this to be a major problem and they said that they could easily get into these systems, if they really tried. There many programs that throw dictionary words at a server until they get access. I was rereading Mr. G's answer to Q 5. He seemed to be saying that the new NRI products can rescue this situation. I need a technocrat to discuss this further. I also would like someone who knows something about this field to contact NRI directly to report on this. The other and VERY SERIOUS problem that BYTE says MS faces is the fact that MS issues ActiveX signatures to software developers who write to and for their software. These are supposed to be kept entirely secret, and MS has lawyers who sue people who leak them. With the signatures you can get into the guts of the operating system. Sometimes, hackers get hold of them. My question, which I was not able to ask, does NRI have a product (or are they developing a product) that could replace the Active X signatures? If they do I hope that they wont sell it for $200.00 because I know that Bill G. would mark it up tremendously. It is a potential huge market. Thanks to anyone who will carry through with this enquiry and report back. Regards, Sheldon