Wednesday, September 8, 1993

Re: The risks of CERT teams vs we all know (Cohen, RISKS-15.02) Let's go back and review history (briefly). The CERT teams, beginning with the original CERT at CMU, were a reaction to the now infamous Morris Worm of 1988. The folks who "solved" the worm problem by disassembling the worm and generating patches for the network community, in a matter of hours, were the university people, both staff and students. Then, we had source code. Today vendors are more and more making their source code unavailable, or too expensive, or available only under untenable terms(1). Fewer of us university people now have source code for contemporary systems. Yet the crackers out there have all the source code they can steal, which is quite a collection. I know, I saw it. The network is as vulnerable today as it was in 1988... We'll see what happens the next time! -Jeff [1] Terms for example that prohibit students from having access. [Jeffrey I. Schiller via risks-digest Volume 15, Issue 03] 5:19 # G!