Slashdot Mirror
Ongoing Linux/Solaris Compromise Epidemic
An anonymous reader writes to point out that Stanford's Information Technology Systems and Services "has written a summary of a series of compromises that have been happening at universities, research institutions, and high performance computing centers, for the last month or more. The attackers are using known vulnerabilities in Linux and Solaris, along with compromised user accounts, to gain access and control of systems, from standalone servers to HPC clusters ... (the attacks are still ongoing)."
Isn't this old news... like circa 1952?
IPv4 allocations for hobbyists? join the ipalloc-l mailing-list! www.operations.net/mailman/listinfo/ipalloc-l
A good substitute for Linux and Sun boxes. My school migrated two years ago, weren't happier ever since.
Here - those guys make a kernel, kickass GUI environment (faster than GNOME and easier to use than KDE) plus some office word editors and educational stuff like encyclopedias and maps.
I'm running Windows XP!
aQazaQa
Dooes it runs Lunix?
Shh. This is Slashdot... here them's fightin' words!
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Change Linux root password from 1234 to something harder to guess
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Isn't that an oxymoron? Cray Canada's CTO says so. Then again, Borland's CTO said "OS X is my favorite Linux distribution.", so maybe CTOs aren't so smart about Technology after all ;)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Oh, wait...
You know he's at it again!
From the Stanford article:
And further down...
To paraphrase a cliche without any attempt at humor:
Imagine a Beowulf cluster running John the Ripper.
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
You just described 76% of all /. posters.
(And as for numbers and symbols making passwords less crackable--admit it, how many of you use 1337speak to make up the number/symbol quota?)
Doh, how did you know my password was 1337speak? I better change now that you've posted it on Slashdot!
Now, my opinion of MS is not that great, but this just seems wrong
Not really, if one of the companies is a cockroach.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Yeah, vi has grown way too bloated. I can't even put it on a small floppy anymore with my emergency repair tools. Do you know how hard it is to edit anything with ed? Instead I just cat things around.
PC's get compromised if security patches are not applied!
and in other news...
cheerio's get soggy in milk
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
How's the reformation coming?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was looking at one of the Solaris vulnerabilities, and I saw "sadmind".
I thought it was some kind of nasty name for a hacking daemon - until I found out that sadmind was the "Solaris ADMIN Daemon"
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Heh, I'm running Windows 95. I figure by now the hackers are just bored of hacking me.
Security through boredom, my new secret weapon take th^454&*%2^$^^^B
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Don't use passwords *at all*.
Wrong! Use tokens *and passwords* !
Using just tokens opens your users to a wide range of physical attacks... especially if they're college students with roomates who can "borrow" things for a few minutes of infringement.
I wonder if Debian supports any of those systems yet?
Yes. RSA SecureIDs can be used with almost any computer system. (They are a combined physical-token + password solution, and have better hardware compatiblity than a usb-key, as the user reads an LCD screen on the card to see a passkey that expires every 60 seconds)
Everyone needs to go patch their systems immediately. We need to make sure that enough of us are around so that we can still slashdot the webserver that survives.
Where I work (a college Physics dept. that shall remain nameless), we are ruthless wrt securing our unix boxes but tend to be very slack when it comes to windows. The poor technician gets to reimage windows boxes on a regular basis though. Our (bad) attitude tends to be something like: "Oh, you got a virus/worm/trojan huh? Silly you! Pull the blue cable NOW, we'll have your PC fixed within a week. Until then use the student lab." This really helps with user training too! Go ahead, open the attachment, make my day! Now before you all say that we are suckers since creds harvested off windows boxes will tend to be the same as that user's unix creds, I should fill you in. We tend to classify users: "What operating system will you be running on your desktop? Oh, windows...? Is it alright then if we give you /bin/false as your shell? Great!" ie. don't give shell access to windows users, they have no clue as to how to use a CLI anyway! On top of that we are uber paranoid about account expiration and passwd policy due to these recent local root exploits and restrict remote ssh fanatically using an SSL PHP page. When a user wants remote ssh they have to visit this page, authenticate and nominate the ip from which they will connect. They get 2 weeks max before they have to repeat this process and each time they do we get and they get an email confirming their submission. FYI, cron runs a PHP script that writes the active user@ip lines to /etc/ssh/sshd_conf from the MySQL db.