 |
Sunday, January 28, 2001 |
|
Consider the following two spam emails, one sent apparently from a
Birmingham (bhm), Alabama BellSouth.net dial-up via a mail server at a
hospital in Easton, PA and the other (picked off
news.admin.net-abuse.email) sent from a Jacksonville dial-up of
Coastalnet.com via the same mail server to British Columbia.
You'll notice that the first one spent 84 hours in the hospital mail
server, from 4:30 P.M. Wednesday until 4:30 A.M. Sunday.
Now it is possible that someone was sending important medical data through
that mail server. Some lab instruments these days even use email--I once
received porno spam via what I was told was a microscope at a Belgian
university. (the university hadn't known that the microscope was running
sendmail and therefore hadn't bothered to take its usual precautions against
spammers)
An 84-hour delay in important hospital email could, in theory, kill a
patient.
By the way, I have noticed that these spams apparently for a pyramid scheme
(International Global Prosperity?) come from all over the country and use
the same open mail server for mail sent in a certain week or so. Assuming
that third party relaying of bulk email without explicit permission of the
server owner is a crime, there appears to be an interstate criminal
conspiracy. [Sanner@flashmail.com via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 23]
0:00
#
G!
| |
On 21 Jan 2001, DirecTV remotely disabled about 100,000 smart-card enabled
set-top boxes that controlled illegal reception of their satellite TV.
(Buried in the programming code was a message that read "GAME OVER" -- for
those who perused the code.) About 9.5 million legitimate subscribers pay
something like $50/month for the hardware and $22/month for the programming.
DirectTV estimates this will save them over $100 million/year. The pirated
operations involved the iterative installation of bogus software that
enabled access despite each successive vendor change to the programming
code. DirectTV believes that the counteraction disabled all of those bogus
smartcards containing illegal software. DirectTV is part of Hughes
Electronics. [Source: P.J. Huffstutter and Jon Healey, *LA Times*;
PGN-ed (How long will it be until the next-iteration hack occurs?)] ["Peter G. Neumann" via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 23]
0:00
#
G!
| |
Maximillian Dornseif, 2002.
|
|
|
