I've been under the weather - still trying to catch up. The good news: networking situation resolved, much easier to post again.
posted by mt at 13:47

The Economist has a great article on computer security. A solid explanation of why everyone needs to address and understand such issues.

Until recently, most people were either unaware of computer security or regarded it as unimportant. That used to be broadly true, except in a few specialised areas - such as banking, aerospace and military applications - that rely on computers and networks being hard to break into and not going wrong. But now consumers, companies and governments around the world are sitting up and taking notice. Why?

posted by mt at 08:08

The Register has a take on the nameserver DDOS from last week. Definitely some good points here:

As it turns out, in the real world there are 'blue teams' capable of shifting in difficult situations and putting up obstacles to the 'most sophisticated attack in the history of the Internet' (actually it was a monumentally crude attack, but let's not quibble). Airplanes were not crashed by hackers -- nor will they be so long as pilots continue to fly them rather than Web bots. The flood gates of dams were not opened and no villages were swept away. Chemical additives were not incorporated into foodstuffs in toxic quantities because there are humans working on the production lines. The vast torrents of spam and viruses continued circulating. All was right with the world.

BUT - as others have pointed out, this was not a very sophisticated attack, keep that in mind.

posted by mt at 07:55

In case you didn't (and I don't know how because it's everywhere), Wired reports on Saddam's hacked email account. It's not quite what you think, but it's an amusing read.
posted by mt at 07:49

Slashdot links to a a whitepaper describing Curious Yellow - a coordinated worm design. If you're into the super exploit theory, check this out.

One thing which the Warhol paper mentions is that better results might be achieved via a coordinated worm in which various instances of the worm on different computers communicate with each other in order to optimize infection. The Warhol paper states, however, that no coordinated worm has ever been created. This paper proposes the first design for a worm which utilizes efficient communication between worm instances for an optimal infection strategy.

posted by mt at 07:41

Yes - sad news. It was out of service for a while, which explains the lack of posts. I'll see if I can find out what happened and relay the info. In other news, the network situation here should be resolved soon - more posts!
posted by mt at 13:05