rang@cpsin3.cps.msu.edu (Anton Rang) (11/15/88)
I'm about ready to agree with Weemba about releasing the virus (or something) every month. A little looking around campus here indicates that around 60% of our computers STILL have debugging enabled. I figure 20% were safe before (by virtue of not running BSD-derived sendmails), so we managed to get about 1 out of 5 machines fixed up. Looking around the net (picking 5 machines at more-or-less random out of /etc/hosts, until I had 5 which were reachable), one out of the 5 machines didn't know debug. And that was because it never did in the first place (IBM/VM system). Several of these were at sites which I *know* were hit in the initial infection. On our campus, I've been sending messages to 'postmaster' and/or 'root' in the vain hope something will get done. I doubt it will, though. Maybe what we need is a worm which just sends back the password file to a machine which mails out warnings to all the USERS on the machine.... I suppose it's hopeless...<sigh>... +---------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+ | Anton Rang (grad student) | "UNIX: Just Say No!" | "Do worry...be SAD!" | | Michigan State University | rang@cpswh.cps.msu.edu | | +---------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
rang@cpsin3.cps.msu.edu (Anton Rang) (11/15/88)
In article <1076@cps3xx.UUCP>, I wrote: > A little looking around campus here indicates >that around 60% of our computers STILL have debugging enabled. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Someone kindly pointed out to me that having debugging is not the real problem; the problem is that debugging lets you mail to programs. So replace "debugging enabled" with "the original, insecure debugging mode enabled" (or something to that effect). We now return you to your regular programming. +---------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+ | Anton Rang (grad student) | "UNIX: Just Say No!" | "Do worry...be SAD!" | | Michigan State University | rang@cpswh.cps.msu.edu | | +---------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+