[techtalk] Question for the group Viruses and whoops! (long and windy:)

Steve Kudlak chromexa at ovis.net
Thu Oct 14 19:32:11 EST 1999


At 11:52 AM 10/14/99 -0600, Clare Smith wrote:
><snip>

Steve says: Whoops...Speaking of inadvertly doing this worng...Just sent an
empty message via a mistake I made in Eudora. Speaking of Windoz,
misdesign. OK, this is kind of sociological and hope I won't get snarled at
for it.

There haven't been the same type of "misdeeds" in the Unix Community. Most
people who do weird stuff like to do things like: (1) Most Innocent: People
who are learning system programming and say, blow it with system calls that
create other processes, like "fork". Seen that run the system load up and
crash. (2) Have seen people do something like that intentionally, usually
overcharged and bored people learning systems programming, who do that
intentionally for malicious fun or revenge. (3) People who don't realize
that if you set it up that way unix, and linux will barrel right ahead and
do what it thinks you want. These things include mistakes with  commands
like rm, chmod and so forth. I mean many people think they will be stopped
if they do rm *.* or some thing equivelent or worse. University systems
usually prevent this by giving a default "setup files" that say do: alias
rm rm -i (so the users get explictly asked if to delete something). This is
seldom done by people who run root, often don't like this. So if someone
gets dead tired and leaves something setting with the # prompt, and someone
goes crusing around looking, they can often find a root account on some
machine to play with. This happened at a large University where I worked.
Usually people just gave themselves accounts, etc. 

People mostly play around trying to get access, show off power that they
have and stuff like that. Getting the root password, "pass working"
(password and telnet (mis)use to sniff out passwords, credit card numbers,
often if male to get access to "cute babe pix".  Mainly the drive seems
towards access to something, arranging for your benefit, doing something
cute. Telnet misuse has become the worry among several sysadmins I know and
they push towards disallowing telnet and wanting people to use ssh and
things like that. Same with PGP knowledge...especially that PGP has become
a sort of default standadrd protection scheme.

A sysadmin I know out west worries about "script kiddies" which are
(presumably)young people,  who basically have a "script" or program that
they perceive "gives them magic powers". They can do nasty things: (1)
Innocently not knowing what they can do, worse when you have been say in a
highly protected environment and get into a high power environment. This is
a mistake yours truly made, although yours truly had "legitmate access".
(2) Being malicious against someone who one feels has been nasty to
oneself. Have been tempted by that one...never did anything. 

These are my takes on types of misdeeds and questionable deeds I have seen
happen under Unix. 
With talking to other people who have had seen things. I have tried to keep
it to what I have known and seen, or got from close sources. 

Here people (mainly but not all "teenagers") boast of their skills, but I
have never found whether any of their boasted skills were real. I know that
it is certain areas that seem to have people with high levels of Unix
Skills. Often people who want to "crack unix" wantt access to say "goodies"
or get embarassing things, like personal letters, love letters, legal
documents and so forth. Unix was (dunno about "is" ) viewed as kind of
boring and not worth it by many people knew. Unless they knew that say such
and such a system had "goodies" on it. 

Her by the way, is right now Wheeling, West Virginia in the USA. I might
add that often getting questionable access to unix is much more of a
stealth thing. I found people who did this as I mentioned want access, fun
and goodies. Sort of like breaking in and giving oneself extensive
voice-mail and long distance access via some company. 

I have only been the "victim" of some virus attacks. Luckily, they were
easily cured. They were on personal computers. I only know of people who
boasted about their virus skill took joy in the thought of many people
setting down and getting a nassty suprise. As I said these people, never
could? would? explain viruses to me. Whereas other types would love to
describe in great detail "how I got Unix." 

So this has tbeen such a long and windy, it is the only way I could
describe it. I have noticed among various "communities" a more increased
interest in Unix. But it has been more like " What is Unix good for, why do
I want it??" So this bears watching.


Have Fun,
Sends Steve
(chromexa at ovis.net)



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