Windows XP Home Edition Default File Sharing A Big Security Hole
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If you use Windows XP Home Edition, you may not realize it, but you most likely have a big security hole sitting on your desk.
This is because Windows XP Home Edition comes with public file sharing enabled by default. (By the way, “file sharing” is not a dirty word, or words, or even illegal. In this context, it simply means putting files in a public area on your hard drive so that others can access them from outside of your machine - such as sharing files between computers on your home network.)
The problem with this is that if you have file sharing turned on for your home network, and your computer is connected to the Internet (as it almost certainly is), then you may, by default, have also supplied access to your public files to 11,000,000 of your closest friends on the Internet.
“But Aunty,” Aunty can hear you saying, “what’s so unsafe about that? If it is enabled by default, surely it must be a secure setup, right?”
Wrong.
The problem is that…
[Windows XP Home Edition Default File Sharing A Big Security Hole, continued]
5 Comments
Bob Brown
February 16th, 2007
at 6:11pm
You’re not sharing with the entire internet if you have hardware firewall. You know, a router. This article is fore nubes. Then you’re just sharing within your own network, but why else would you even have file sharing enabled?
pero lazarevic
February 18th, 2007
at 3:26pm
Hi, I have bay comp whit vin XP and it is registrate on my name,but short time ago my hard driver is brocken and I both a nader one. The problem I have is that I did not recive a CD windows.Haw I can get my win back? thank you.
gnu33
April 5th, 2007
at 12:31pm
about that lost windows cd… just install Linux, it’s got everything u need and u don’t have to worry about those nasty security holes (as the one described above)
apostel_13
May 24th, 2007
at 10:43am
@ message above: hehe, true, this is kind of funny, i was looking for “windows security holes” i find this page of “windows fanatics, and one of the only posts is: use linux
i totaly agree! i’m using linux right noiw and i can do EVERYTHING!
it’s free, easy and very secure (the first one who breaks into my computer gets a free cookie)
ACE
October 2nd, 2008
at 1:42pm
I installed a program called “sunporn” by mistake during the installation of another program…Its reconfigured my security files and locked me out of basic controls of my XP sp2, it seems to have reconfigured my hard drives, anyone have an idea on how to restore, to original security files??