Implications of recent virus (Trojan Horse) attack

[Tony Nardo]

In article <8908 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>In article <270 at popvax.harvard.edu> mohamed at popvax.UUCP (R06400 at Mohamed Ellozy) writes:
>-This is what irritates the living daylights out of so many of us.
>-He "knows" of at least three other such holes.  He is thus more
>-learned, perhaps even wiser, than we are.
>-	BUT WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING TO GET THEM CLOSED???
>
>The BSD developers know of all three holes and have published fixes for
>two of them.  BRL's network host tester will probe for them and inform
>system administrators if they have these holes.

I don't mean to sound facetious, but I seem to recall some news article
mentioning that there were 60,000+ nodes on the Internet.  Let's assume that
only 5% of these systems use some flavor of 4.* BSD.  Let's also assume that
only 40% of those systems have administrators who wish to have those holes
identified and (possibly) plugged.  Does BRL have the facilities to test 1200+
nodes before some other clever person develops a copycat "infection"?  Or even
distribute a "hole test kit" to that many sites?

There *must* be a better way to distribute information on how to check for
these holes than to have every Internet site queue up for BRL's test...

							Tony

P.S.	To Mohamed: if you discovered one of these holes, and realized that
	a second worm could very easily be written to exploit it, what would
	*you* do?

	Actually, anyone may feel free to answer this.  Please reply to me
	by E-mail.  I'll attempt to summarize.

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