Content area
Full text
SATAN is coming to a network near you. That much is clear.
But whether SATAN -- the Security Analysis Tool for Auditing Networks -- will prove to be a hacker's weapon from hell or a trusted ally of network administrators was a matter of much debate last week.
The SATAN "attack scanner" is one of a handful of software packages intended to probe the networks of Unix computers for security flaws.
SATAN has been under development -- and discussion in cyberspace -- for more than a year. But worries escalated last week when it was learned that SATAN was among the software purloined recently by notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick. SATAN's authors -- a security researcher and a network security specialist -- said last week they will distribute beta copies of the code March 5 and make it generally available on April 1.
SATAN's authors said the attack scanner will report information back to the user about poorly configured network services, bugs in systems...