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Test ID:1.3.6.1.4.1.25623.1.0.10043
Category:Useless services
Title:Check for Chargen Service (TCP)
Summary:The remote host is running a 'chargen' service.
Description:Summary:
The remote host is running a 'chargen' service.

Vulnerability Insight:
When contacted, chargen responds with some random characters
(something like all the characters in the alphabet in a row). When contacted via TCP, it will
continue spewing characters until the client closes the connection.

The purpose of this service was to mostly to test the TCP/IP protocol by itself, to make sure that
all the packets were arriving at their destination unaltered. It is unused these days, so it is
suggested you disable it, as an attacker may use it to set up an attack against this host, or
against a third party host using this host as a relay.

Vulnerability Impact:
An easy attack is 'ping-pong' in which an attacker spoofs a
packet between two machines running chargen. This will cause them to spew characters at each
other, slowing the machines down and saturating the network.

Solution:
- Under Unix systems, comment out the 'chargen' line in
/etc/inetd.conf and restart the inetd process

- Under Windows systems, set the following registry keys to 0 :

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\SimpTCP\Parameters\EnableTcpChargen

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\SimpTCP\Parameters\EnableUdpChargen

Then launch cmd.exe and type :

net stop simptcp

net start simptcp

To restart the service.

CVSS Score:
5.0

CVSS Vector:
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P

Cross-Ref: Common Vulnerability Exposure (CVE) ID: CVE-1999-0103
Cert/CC Advisory: CA-96.01.UDP_service_denial
https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/advisories/ICSMA-18-233-01
XForce ISS Database: chargen
XForce ISS Database: chargen-patch
XForce ISS Database: echo
Common Vulnerability Exposure (CVE) ID: CVE-1999-0639
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-1999-0639
CopyrightCopyright (C) 1999 Mathieu Perrin

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