“BackOrifice is a remote administration tool for Microsoft
Windows and, as Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at San
Jose-based managed security services firm Counterpane Internet
Security Inc. (link below), points out, “one of the coolest hacking
tools ever developed…”
“Perfectly respectable programs, like pcAnywhere or Microsoft
Systems Management Server [SMS], do the same thing. They allow a
network administrator to remotely troubleshoot a computer. If the
server is installed on a computer without the knowledge or consent
of its owner, the client can effectively “own” the victim’s
PC…”
“In Unix, an attacker would first have to get root
privileges. Not in Windows. There’s no such thing as limited
privileges or administrator privileges or root privileges. This
might have made some sense in the age of isolated desktop
computers. But on the Internet, this is absurd.“