RE: DB2UDB hack

["Lukas Beeler" <l.beeler@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Joe,

> There are lots of things that can compromise the security of my
machine, but
> i5/OS ain't one of them - it's people making decisions that degrade
the

Let me disagree here a bit. I know many, many shops that run unencrypted
5250/ODBC/FTP to their System i.
This is horribly insecure, but it is a default configuration supplied by
IBM.

The default password policies and available password length are also not
especially secure.

Microsoft has learned from their mistakes, so did many Linux
distributions, shipping a "secure by default" configuration.

Buffer overflows, exploits, etc. are all a danger that has to be
mitigated by the OS vendor. The design of i5/OS allows IBM to ship
around most of those common problems, and I think that's a very good
achievement.

But IBM, and most of it's customers, have been slacking off and have not
thought about using secure and encrypted methods to access their system
through the network.

(Please note that this is in no way a personal attack against you, I'm
talking about what I've seen at some of our customers)