OUR EXPERT
Tam Hanna
often finds himself press-ganged into IT admin duty for friends and family. Sadly, they are usually a few hours’ worth of travel away from his bunker.
Remote desktop connections are nothing new. More than 20 years ago, the venerable VNC R protocol enabled this writer to access their Vienna-bound workstation from abroad. Furthermore, accessing the headless CVS server was made much easier via its VNC service. In practice, however, VNC is not particularly comfortable. Firstly, the workstation that is to be remote-controlled usually needs to publicly expose the port where the VNC server will wait for commands. This requires router configuration and is a first-grade attack vector for every type of miscreant seeking to add a new machine to their botnet. Keep in mind that Towarisch Haxxor never sleeps and that port scans explicitly search for VNC services.
On the other hand, a service such as TeamViewer requires the inputting of an ID – punching through the various routers is handled by the operator. This can be of great value when the system to be administrated has a dynamic IP address; services such as http://heise.de/ip tend to be a major challenge for technically unsophisticated users.