One of these guys, interland.com, sent me a nice snailmail letter bearing the Network Solutions(my registrar) logo. I called them and they told me that they were now the billing agent for Network Solutions, and that Network Solutions no longer handled that part of their business, so I re-registered with interland. Interland then sent me email with a form that I had to fill out to authorize them to transfer my domain to interland. I contacted Network Solutions, they said they were still doing their own billing. It took me months to get interland to refund my money.
Along the same lines, if I decide to go shooting randomly down a crowded busy street, then this isn't criminal. I wasn't shooting at anyone in particular, and no one told them to be on that sidewalk at that time of day.
I am no fan of Microsoft, believe me, but blaming them for this is ludicrous. Microsoft's software didn't cause this situation. Microsoft's software made it possible for an idiot to hack into a website, but it did not cause West to hack in. This type of logic is the same that is employed in showing how, since Phil Zimmerman wrote PGP, and encryption software was used by the terrorists, he caused the WTC to be destroyed.
Our company maintains its own firewall, but we are on a corporate WAN, so we are basically forced to trust the firewalls of all the other sites back here with us. Even if our firewall is 100% imune to these things, we can still get hit.
Obviously I wouldn't advocate moving away from IIS if your whole company is built on it, with ASPs and Indexing etc etc, but if you're using it for bringing up intranet reports, or other tasks that don't require ASP, switch. You'll save a lot of headache.
The last round of Microsoft Updates designed to prevent Nimda caused one of our IIS servers to Dr. Watson whenever you tried to start it up. That was the last straw for me.
Funny, seeing this article. We just did this. We switched all of our NT IIS servers to NT Apache for Web and CesarFTP for FTP services. No IIS, no IIS problem.
I'm totally against putting back doors in crypto, for all the obvious reasons, but if asked whether I thought that back doors in crypto would have helped prevent what we saw 9/11, I'd have to say "Maybe." Reword the question "Do you think that all crypto should have backdoors in it?" and I think the response would be different.
Willie from The Simpsons had the best taunts...
on
Duke's All Out of Gum
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Bonjour..., you cheese eating surrender monkeys!
And, of course,
You blouse wearin' poodle walker.
I'm the systems manager for the operations division of the newspaper in Charlotte, N.C., the Charlotte Observer. I'm on call 24/7, and can expect to be called in off hours at least once a week. I generally do 45 hrs/week in the office, and another 5-10 working from home, or being paged in.
Actually, if eEye hadn't made the exploit, Microsoft probably wouldn't have fixed the bug. Having an exploit out there and available lit the fire under Microsoft to try to raise awareness of their own.
Well, this isn't actuall as bad as you might think. The attacker has to be in a pretty specific point, somewhere between you and your target. Some script kiddie sitting at home with his road runner account will still need to hack into an ISP that's routing your packets in order to intercept. And, that warning that SSH gives saying that they key changed should never be ignored. If you get that, drop the connection.
You're missing the point. If someone wrote a malicious Perl script, and emailed it to the root account of all Linux users it could find, and someone said "Sure, I have no idea what this script is going to do, but why not, I'll run it anyway." It would have the exact same effect. The only thing Microsoft is guilty of here is creating an environment where so many people are using the same email program and OS, and making the programming of the system so easy to do.
It launched Outlook because the script creates an Outlook object to use Outlook's address book and mail sending features. It doesn't use Outlook to delete files, it used the standard File Services Object available in vbscript. Outlook didn't care what kind of executable it was, neither did Eudora. It recognized it as an executable and ran it because you ASKED it to!
There are any number of script interpreters that would allow the exact same thing to happen. Is Perl also a security risk because it can modify files on a hard drive? If the program had been written in Assembler, it could have done the exact same thing. It could even have been made to spread using the Netscape address book, and it could have been made to replicate without the need for Outlook. I'm extremely anti-microsoft, but this one isn't really their fault. All Microsoft did here was make it so easy that even an idiot like the author of the ILOVEYOU worm could do it. Used to be virus authors had to be good programmers, now not so much.
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Someone please mod this up!
Now I gotta clean the diet Pepsi off my monitor...
One of these guys, interland.com, sent me a nice snailmail letter bearing the Network Solutions(my registrar) logo. I called them and they told me that they were now the billing agent for Network Solutions, and that Network Solutions no longer handled that part of their business, so I re-registered with interland. Interland then sent me email with a form that I had to fill out to authorize them to transfer my domain to interland. I contacted Network Solutions, they said they were still doing their own billing. It took me months to get interland to refund my money.
Along the same lines, if I decide to go shooting randomly down a crowded busy street, then this isn't criminal. I wasn't shooting at anyone in particular, and no one told them to be on that sidewalk at that time of day.
I am no fan of Microsoft, believe me, but blaming them for this is ludicrous. Microsoft's software didn't cause this situation. Microsoft's software made it possible for an idiot to hack into a website, but it did not cause West to hack in. This type of logic is the same that is employed in showing how, since Phil Zimmerman wrote PGP, and encryption software was used by the terrorists, he caused the WTC to be destroyed.
Our company maintains its own firewall, but we are on a corporate WAN, so we are basically forced to trust the firewalls of all the other sites back here with us. Even if our firewall is 100% imune to these things, we can still get hit.
Obviously I wouldn't advocate moving away from IIS if your whole company is built on it, with ASPs and Indexing etc etc, but if you're using it for bringing up intranet reports, or other tasks that don't require ASP, switch. You'll save a lot of headache.
The last round of Microsoft Updates designed to prevent Nimda caused one of our IIS servers to Dr. Watson whenever you tried to start it up. That was the last straw for me.
Funny, seeing this article. We just did this. We switched all of our NT IIS servers to NT Apache for Web and CesarFTP for FTP services. No IIS, no IIS problem.
Or perhaps they won't write it because, hey, who can't hack Windows 2000??
I'm totally against putting back doors in crypto, for all the obvious reasons, but if asked whether I thought that back doors in crypto would have helped prevent what we saw 9/11, I'd have to say "Maybe." Reword the question "Do you think that all crypto should have backdoors in it?" and I think the response would be different.
Bonjour..., you cheese eating surrender monkeys! And, of course, You blouse wearin' poodle walker.
I'm the systems manager for the operations division of the newspaper in Charlotte, N.C., the Charlotte Observer. I'm on call 24/7, and can expect to be called in off hours at least once a week. I generally do 45 hrs/week in the office, and another 5-10 working from home, or being paged in.
Actually, if eEye hadn't made the exploit, Microsoft probably wouldn't have fixed the bug. Having an exploit out there and available lit the fire under Microsoft to try to raise awareness of their own.
Yeah, as I understand it, almost all planes that crash into the ocean first fly really low.
Well, this isn't actuall as bad as you might think. The attacker has to be in a pretty specific point, somewhere between you and your target. Some script kiddie sitting at home with his road runner account will still need to hack into an ISP that's routing your packets in order to intercept. And, that warning that SSH gives saying that they key changed should never be ignored. If you get that, drop the connection.
You're missing the point. If someone wrote a malicious Perl script, and emailed it to the root account of all Linux users it could find, and someone said "Sure, I have no idea what this script is going to do, but why not, I'll run it anyway." It would have the exact same effect. The only thing Microsoft is guilty of here is creating an environment where so many people are using the same email program and OS, and making the programming of the system so easy to do.
It launched Outlook because the script creates an Outlook object to use Outlook's address book and mail sending features. It doesn't use Outlook to delete files, it used the standard File Services Object available in vbscript. Outlook didn't care what kind of executable it was, neither did Eudora. It recognized it as an executable and ran it because you ASKED it to!
There are any number of script interpreters that would allow the exact same thing to happen. Is Perl also a security risk because it can modify files on a hard drive? If the program had been written in Assembler, it could have done the exact same thing. It could even have been made to spread using the Netscape address book, and it could have been made to replicate without the need for Outlook. I'm extremely anti-microsoft, but this one isn't really their fault. All Microsoft did here was make it so easy that even an idiot like the author of the ILOVEYOU worm could do it. Used to be virus authors had to be good programmers, now not so much.