About that net attack last night

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com>
Reply-To: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com>
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 12:34:17 -0800 (PST)
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: About that net attack last night


Regarding that port 1434 attack on the net last night.

I read the note on IP in which government folks implied that everything
was under control because they were monitoring it.

Give me a break!  That's like saying that Sept 11 was under control
because it was "monitored" on CNN!

When I had connectivity, I watched this thing unravel on the NANOG (North
American Network Operators Group) mailing list and on others.  And it is
my observation that it was the network operators and non-governmental
security folks who figured it out; the US government's vaunted poo-bahs
contributed nothing.

A big "thank you" should go to the folks at the ISPs around the world who
bore the brunt of this thing, quickly discovered and deployed the
necessary filters, and disseminated that filtering information.

Paraphrasing the closing line of King Kong - No, it wasn't the government,
it was the engineers at the ISPs who killed the beast.

Two thoughts:

1. E-mail was somewhat broken as a result of the worm, making it hard for
corrective information to propogate as fast as it could have.  Clearly
independent, out-of-band mechanisms are good things to have.  But I have a
concern that we are cross-linking our diverse communications systems in a
way that could increase risk of cross-system susceptability of what
othewise seem to be independent systems.

2. The worm had been reverse engineered within a few hours - I wonder
whether that could be considered a violation of the DMCA? ;-)

        --karl--










------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
To unsubscribe or update your address, click
  http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/