File and Printer Sharing vulnerabilities

[Raion]

It's going to be EVENTUALLY (as soon as my laptops PCIMIA card arrives) wireless, in the meantime it's "hardlined". Yeah it's going through a router, this router has some firewall settings but I just got it today so haven't done much exploring of the options yet.

[nihil]

I am afraid that I am not much of a help here as I have only ever shared printers in a home environment.

However I do believe that a lot of the "security risk" you refer to was based on the precept that if you don't use something then turn it off so you won't have to worry about it, and it cannot be used to harm you.

Obviously, file and printer sharing are commonplace in commercial and institutional environments, so they are not inherently dangerous, provided they are set up properly and the rest of your system is secure.

I would be inclined to argue that it is the act of networking that is potentially dangerous, rather than the sharing..................and there wouldn't be much point in networking two production PCs without some sort of sharing?

[BrainStop]

It's going to be EVENTUALLY (as soon as my laptops PCIMIA card arrives) wireless, in the meantime it's "hardlined". Yeah it's going through a router, this router has some firewall settings but I just got it today so haven't done much exploring of the options yet.

Raion,

I think that the thing you need to look at is blocking any incoming traffic on the printer and file sharing ports (can't remember them of the top of my head).

The risk of file and printer sharing is that you open a listener on additional ports, which intruders can try to hijack. If you block these at your router, you start limiting the risk.

The second thing to do is to beef up your firewall on the PC which is going to be doing the sharing. Only allow incoming connections from the address (ideally MAC address) of the other PC. You could also look at what limits you can configure in your router to do MAC address filtering.

Basically, the more you can limit who is allowed to do what the less chances you take.

Cheers,

BrainStop