Running a casual nmap scan against my home LAN (HLAN?) some time back, I noticed something new: what looked like a server offering several ports was running inside my firewall! I had a moment of intense cold sweat before I remembered we’d bought a new Sony Bluray player, a nice little Internet-connectable jobbie that I plugged into my Ethernet with hardly a thought.
Now I was giving it a thought. Hmm, what was this thing running? A quick OS scan turned up VXworks, an OS used extensively in set-top boxes. Which made me think immediately: Hmm. Anti-virus? Firewall? Administration interface? Debug modes?
Ten more minutes of search dug up the fact that yes, many VXworks devices shipped with debugging turned on. Uh-huh. (I once worked with a developer who had joined our Coldfusion team who looked at the output of the testing server, which had debug/regenerate turned on, and cried “Look at this! It’s making like a thousand calls to every routine on the site!”
Uh-huh.
Five more minutes of research: Yup. McAffee and Windriver are already teaming up on anti-malware products.
http://blogs.windriver.com/networking/vxworks/
Which is okay. But what it really means is: now I need to worry about anti-malware for my Bluray player.
Great.
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