Interesting People mailing list archives
more on "Rumplestiltskin worm" on the loose?
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 8 May 2005 09:05:51 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat org> Date: May 7, 2005 9:05:57 PM EDT To: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com> Cc: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com>, dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] "Rumplestiltskin worm" on the loose? At 06:41 PM 5/7/2005, Lauren Weinstein wrote:
Most of this stuff would have been done differently if we had realized at the time that so much of it was going to end up used by the masses in the manner it is today, that's for sure.
That was one thing I kept harping on in graduate school. The moment HP, Sun, and other Silicon Valley companies got on the ARPANet, I was asking people, "What about Aunt Tillie?" I was on The WELL when it was allowed to hook up to the Net via UC Berkeley over a horrendously expensive "experimental" X.25 link (which was mostly used for Netnews). I saw the rest as inevitable. I remember when I discovered that anyone could log into the unsecured terminal servers at most universities -- with no password -- and establish TCP sessions with machines on the ARPAnet. I had written a terminal emulator with sophisticated scripting capabilities, and one weekend coded an SMTP client in the scripting language. I think I still have the code on one of my old MS-DOS machines. With it, I could inject e-mail into the ARPAnet just by calling any of several local numbers at Stanford. (If I wanted to go farther afield, I also could have called UC Davis or UC Berkeley.) I happened to be authorized to use Stanford's network because I was a grad student at the time, but what I was doing was a demonstration of how easy it would be to "abuse" the ability to make connections on Port 25. Yes, I could have spammed the entire ARPAnet right then and there. I mentioned my little experiment to Russell Brand, who was aghast. He knew the potential of what I was doing and was justifiably worried that others would find out. I told him, "Russell, people ARE going to find out about this, and I don't need to be the one to tell them." Now they have. --Brett ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- more on "Rumplestiltskin worm" on the loose? David Farber (May 08)
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- more on "Rumplestiltskin worm" on the loose? David Farber (May 11)