[Fife Linux Users Group] Hear how the hairdresser brought down the US Military and NASA

[Barrie Dempster]

On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 13:03 +0100, John A Thomson of Roundtrip Solutions
Limited wrote:
> Listen to why and how the "hairdresser" brought down the US Military
> and is
> now facing extradition and 70 years in a US prison. It is scary
> listening
> how easily he compromised US military systems! 

Not really that scary as he was mostly in NASA systems which are among
the most attacked systems in the world, infact in the late 80s and early
90s NASA tolerated hackers and sometimes welcomed them as they didn't
consider a lot of the research attached to the Internet all that
valuable (most of it was freely available in print). Breaking into a
NASA system was one of the first things someone exploring networks would
want to do (possibly after a .edu which they'd use as a launch
platform). The security is much tighter now, however the machines and
information that have seriously classified levels have proper security
with segregated networks. He did not easily to get to those from the
Internet(I very much doubt he got to them at all) McKinnon's stuff was,
as far as we have been made aware, script kiddie antics and his comments
that NASA have contact with aliens but he can't give specifics because
he was smoking a lot of dope at the time, seem dubious at best. If he
had seen that sort of information he'd have got hard copies straight
away and it'd need serious amounts of dope to forget that. The fact that
the US have reacted harshly is no indication of the level of
penetration, ever since Mitnick the US have always over-reacted to
anything affecting the national infrastructure.

Even ZDNet saw that this guy was a moron:
https://www.bsrf.org.uk/article.php?story=20050610203447450


If you think that's scary, the NSA were notified about a flaw in their
website over _2 months ago_. It's still there today !!
https://www.bsrf.org.uk/article.php?story=20050723000818977

Apologies for linking to my own stuff twice, but it does have
relevance :-)



-- 
With Regards..
Barrie Dempster (zeedo) - Fortiter et Strenue

blog: http://reboot-robot.net
site: http://www.bsrf.org.uk
ca:   https://www.cacert.org/index.php?id=3

"He who hingeth aboot, geteth hee-haw" Victor - Still Game
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 1859 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/standrews/attachments/20050730/364b196b/smime.bin