Subject: Re: SV: John Chambers Tune Finder? To: IRTRAD-L@LISTSERV.HEANET.IE
| The server seems to be down. Prehaps a virus?
Nope; a breakin, apparently via telnet and a sniffed password. It was up and down for a bunch of days, as a gang of MIT hackers had fun analyzing the situation. FreeBSD is supposed to quite secure, y'know. But telnet sends passwords in the clear across the Net, and with tools like that, it doesn't much matter how secure the rest of the system is. Anyway, trillian is back up, they say, without telnetd, and we're all changing our passwords, so if you've sniffed any, you'd better get in fast ...
MIT does have a fairly firm policy of "no firewalls". Every machine is hooked up straight to the Internet, with no protection. The idea is that everyone at MIT is supposed to learn enough about computer security to take care of their own machine, dammit. It's a policy that's great for resumes, of course, but can at times lead to down time and the fun of diagnosing the latest exploits. ------- End of forwarded message -------
sj