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Forged transmits/Promiscuous Mode

Can anyone put the risk of not setting the policy for "forged transmits" and "promiscuos mode" to reject into management freindly speak. In terms of if this policy is NOT set to reject, whats the risk in terms of data security/availablity/other, and the likelehood that this issue could be exploited, and by whom? Its in the hardening guides with some commentry on the risk, and the compliance checkers raise it as an issue, but its not all that clear on the exact risk and likelehood of that risk being exploited/occuring, and what ultimately could happen if the risk was exploited (managers usually go on performance/data security to take note of such issues).

How much of an issue is this in your vmware expert opinions? High risk, medium, low, hardly an issue at all?

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Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

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coolsport00

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Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

its much easier for me to walk into your offices, and find a network port on the wall and jack in and sniff?

unless you have port security enabled ON all network switch ports

coolsport00

ha...good point @hanccocka. :) true dat.

again, it's just best practice to configure them according to the security guide, but if it's not config'd, then you have a "hole" open for potential attack. Of COURSE an auditor is going to suggest it be config'd to 'reject'. They will always suggest high security to prevent attacks...

Pau Lo

ASKER

So both promiscuos mode and forged transmits are both around spoof/sniffing traffic?

If you run the compliance checker against your hosts, do you worry about such X's i.e. are you hosts fully compliant with the vsphere compliance checker or are some of the issues so trivial that they arent all that worth worrying about, or is it more a case of it improves security even 1% and therefore we "may as well"?

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

Spoofing and Prom mode are only useful, for low level network monitoring.

coolsport00

For my org, we use the guides as just that - GUIDES. From there, we decide based on SLAs, auditor recommendations, compliance rules/laws on how do secure our environment...

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

if there is no requirement for this, they should not be enabled.