On Wed, 19 Apr 2000, William Chops Westfield wrote:

>
> All the network attacks on yahoo/ebay/etc were from unix systems that had
> been broken into, right?
>
UNIX systems that where run by incompetent system administrators.  A good
sysadmin would never allow that to happen, but the proliferation of NT has
given bosses the idea that any bozo can be an admin.  That just ain't
true.  System administration requires a lot of knowledge, skill and time.
It is not a part-time job.  It involves constant monitoring of CERT lists,
bug-traq, rootshell.com, l0pht, etc. to know what the latest holes are and
plug them immediately.

People who use these rootkits are called script-kiddies.  They generally
have no idea what they're doing, and rarely understand how to use UNIX(a
machine of mine has been broken into before by a script kiddie before I
tightened up the security, he tried a lot of DOS commands like dir,
format, etc. then gave up because the account he had gotten into had
minimal privileges).  All they're doing is following a step-by-step
manual, and they can only get into the least secured of systems.  I'd be
willing to bet that this kid, MafiaBoy, that successfully attacked yahoo,
ebay, etc. was using fraggle(DoS attack, all it does is bring the server
down - no real damage) and if you where to ask him the most basic of UNIX
questions he'd start drooling and shooting sparks.


---
Paul Anderson - Self-employed Megalomaniac
paul@geeky1.ebtech.net
http://zephyr.sellad.on.ca/~paul

"The RX-900 battleship can be used in two modes, PEACE and WAR.  When in PEACE
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when set in WAR mode, it is capable of leveling New York in three seconds."