The remote host is running a 'chargen' service. Description : When contacted, chargen responds with some random characters (something like all the characters in the alphabet in a row). When contacted via UDP, it will respond with a single UDP packet. 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. 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.

- 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.