5 ms·
That was a scary time, the first ever large scale network attack. I found myself a couple days later flying down to DC with some other folks from MIT and Harvar
by yodon 9y ago
That was a scary time, the first ever large scale network attack. I found myself a couple days later flying down to DC with some other folks from MIT and Harvard to brief a bunch of senior DoD and agency types on what happened, but the thing I remember most vividly was getting home late at night after spending the day repeatedly trying to disinfect and protect our machines, only to log in via a 4800 baud modem and see our machines were somehow infected yet again, with the realization we’d changed root passwords so many times I had no idea how to get in and fix it, nor any way to reach our sysadmin who was even more exhausted than I was.
So I called a friend, who is now a physics professor at MIT, and said “Our machines are infected, could you please break in, go root, clean the infection, and send an email to our sysadmin explaining to him you did this at my request?” All he said was “Ok, get some sleep” and yes even though we’d just spent almost 24 hours locking down every possible attack vector into our machines and network we woke up to clean machines with a polite email in the sysadmin’s inbox. I never have figured out whether that was more a measure of the state of network security in the late 1980’s or of the kind of mad skills it takes to become tenure track at a place like MIT.
There is a good telling of the worm story in the final chapters of Cliff Stoll’s amazing book on discovering a case of internet-hacking meets East-German-spies meets 2400-baud-modems and three-letter-agencies back in the mid 1980’s (which spent 42 weeks on the NYTimes bestseller list and is a ton of fun to read)[0]
[0]https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/1416507787 https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espiona...
- danesparza 9y agoI thought this article sounded familiar! :-) The Cuckoo's egg is an amazing read.
- endgame 9y agoI can't believe that I found a copy for 50c in a second-hand store. I call it my "most precious item" because it has the highest price:enjoyment ratio of anything I own.
- marak830 9y agoJust purchased, thanks for the heads up everyone, I'm looking forward to this.
- razakel 9y agoThe hacker Stoll was tracking, Markus Hess, was affiliated with other hackers that went on to found Chaos Computer Club. One of the people he was working alongside, Karl Koch, was selling military information to the KGB in exchange for cocaine. He developed some form of paranoid psychosis and seemed to believe he was fighting the Illuminati. There was a German film made about this called "23" (Koch was obsessed with the cult classic conspiracy fiction novel Illuminatus, and used the pseudonym "hagbard" after a character in the book). He was found burned to death in woodland; it was ruled suicide.
- alexott 9y agoIt's sad that such great books are only available in paper form
- socalnate1 9y agoErr. There is a kindle version available on the amazon link he posted.
- SimonPStevens 9y agoI'm not seeing a kindle edition on either the .co.uk or .com version of the site. Could it be a regional thing? .com: https://imgur.com/a/R6tcW https://imgur.com/a/R6tcW .co.uk: https://imgur.com/a/iNuKR https://imgur.com/a/iNuKR The US site does actually offers an audio cassette for $100, but I'm going to assume that's not really what he wanted when he lamented the lack of a non-paper edition :-)
- tedunangst 9y agoThere is definitely a $9.99 kindle edition on my version of the US site. Dependent on billing/delivery address? Anyway, I can confirm it's there if you can find a way to get to it.
- rasz 9y agoSpeaking of Cliff Stoll and that story(its in the video told by Cliff himself), computer history museum recently posted Computer Crime panel from March 25th, 2000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfuRvB9EpCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfuRvB9EpCo