is telnet safe?

Hey Chris, What do you think about telnet, is it safe? and do you ever here of people talking on irc with telnet? when I say is it safe I mean can someone hack into your computer using telnet?

hacker prompt cmd internet telnet command hack chris irc

asked Jul 15 '10 at 19:44

Geek103
1●2●2●2

This is not a direct line to Chris, he does not respond to questions here. Please Email him at <chris@pirillo.com>

(Jul 15 '10 at 19:46) kevin ♦♦

@Kevin: Sometimes he does, but much like the chat room, it's pretty rare.

(Jul 15 '10 at 21:41) tsilb

Plus with him away at Arizona, it is very rare

(Jul 15 '10 at 21:44) kevin ♦♦

3 Answers:

oldest newest most voted

No, not at all. It is unencrypted so I would never use it. I would always use SSH if I had the option because it is much safer.

If you have some sort of telnet server running and you have a port forwarded to that computer people could get in and try to guess your login information.

answered Jul 15 '10 at 22:25

Liam Quade
7.4k●92●121●197

Telnet, as a client should be extremely safe. Unless there are logical errors in its code, there's nothing the server side can do to your PC.

Telnet, as a server should also be safe, providing the person who set it up is properly qualified and/or knows what they're doing by setting it up.

Telnet as a protocol is junk, though. It's one of those protocols that every programmer generally hates implementing. I guess it's not uncommon for programmers such as myself to discourage its use. I recommend not running a telnet server unless you know what you're doing. I recommend not implementing telnet into any program you develop unless you know what you're doing. If you're using telnet as a client to test a program that you're developing, or just for the sake of it that's fine and should be perfectly secure. I commonly use telnet to retrieve binaries or HTML code that I believe might be malicious.

answered Jul 16 '10 at 01:27

Seb
(suspended)

but if ur running a telnet server u can get hacked right?

(Jul 16 '10 at 01:32) s00p

Yes. It's easy to crack if it's poorly configured and maintained (eg. usernames are easily guessed and passwords are blank/common/etc). It's also easy to crack as cusinndzl pointed out, if some "hacker" can peek at the packets being sent between the client and the server. Telnet is certainly vulnerable to "man in the middle" attacks.

Having said that, anyone using a telnet server should know what they're doing. The odds are, it'll be perfectly safe in the context of their operation. That is of course unless they're an idiot (and they don't know what they're doing). I guess that makes the person the vulnerability ;)

(Jul 16 '10 at 01:41) Seb

ahh huh good answer but when is it safe?

(Jul 16 '10 at 01:47) s00p

It's safe when there is no chance that a hacker could sniff packets or exploit by way of being the man-in-the-middle. For example, if a network administrator needs access to a LAN router on occasions and the router doesn't support SSH then it'll be safe for him/her to use the telnet access, providing his machine isn't infected and he can directly access it without routing through anyone elses routers. This is the only scenario that I believe telnet servers would be appropriate for. Even if SSH is supported, telnet is more lightweight so it may be a good idea to disable SSH in favour of telnet in this scenario.

Generally, even routers are capable of running SSH servers just fine. It is extremely rare that a telnet server will be used because the general rule is to use SSH instead.

(Jul 16 '10 at 01:55) Seb

0	In most cases telnet is completely unencrypted so anyone can sniff the traffic. It can also be pretty unreliable at times. answered Jul 15 '10 at 20:48 Razor512 15.6k●34●80●242

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Asked: Jul 15 '10 at 19:44

Seen: 1,882 times

Last updated: Jul 16 '10 at 01:55

is telnet safe?

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