War Tools! -- continued

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   You can get punched in the nose warning: Before you start playing with the techniques of this chapter, beware. If you use what you learn here for snooping on other people's networks, you should expect them to suspect you of being a computer criminal. For this reason, if you want to explore other people's systems, it helps to make friends with the staff of your ISP so they won't kick you off for suspicion of computer crime. Also, it helps to get permission from the sysadmins of whatever network you are checking out. If you find a problem, you should notify the responsible sysadmin so he or she may fix the problem.

It also helps to maintain a good reputation. If you are known as a troublemaker, you will get lots of grief for using the tools of this chapter. If you have a good reputation, people will believe it when you say you are exploring in order to learn network administration -- or simply for the pure joy of discovery.

If your ISP is one of those big, anonymous places that would kick you off at the least sign of trouble, switch to a local ISP where you can drop in and offer to take the tech support staff out for pizza. Trust me on this, if you try out what this chapter teaches, almost any large ISP will soon give you the boot.

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You can go to jail warning: If you live outside the United States, be sure to check on what the local computer crime laws are. I can't guarantee the tactics of this chapter will be legal everywhere.

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IP Address and Port Scanning

    Every day someone emails me to complains that some host name in an ancient GTMHH won't do cool stuff any more. Imagine that! When I wrote those first GTMHHs I was just sending them to a few friends. I assumed these Guides would soon fade out of existence in the vastness of the Internet. Little did I suspect that eventually tens of thousands of newbies would be fingering, telnetting, ftping, phfing and worse into those IP addresses. So of course their sysadmins have buttoned them down. Strangers can't play with them any more.

More War Tools--->>

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