Wednesday, February 14, 2001

Hacker defends his vandalism, blames the victims Defending his vandalism as an attempt to do good, a 20-year-old Dutch student arrested for creating the so-called Anna Kournikova computer virus that jammed Internet traffic throughout the world justified his action by saying he "never wanted to harm the people" whose computers he infected. He claims he intended only to issue them a warning to tighten their Internet security, and insisted that "after all it's their own fault they got infected." (AP/*The New York Times*, 14 Feb 2001; NewsScan Daily, 14 Feb 2001 http://partners.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Tennis-Virus.html; as usual, copyright material, reprinted in RISKS with permission) ["NewsScan" via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 24] 0:00 # G!

AnnaKournikova worm (from Esa-l, via Mark Luntzel) Well, we have survived the AnnaKournilova worm, but unfortunately this worm is directly responsible for our fax machine blowing up. Apparently numerous employees at our company is in our Attorney's address book. Apparently the law firm got hit pretty hard. Funny thing is, instead it being emailed to the recepients they were faxed. Got a pile of about 250 pages where the worm itself was faxed to numerous people at our office. The fax machine just couldn't handle it and blew up. Being we thought this was quite funny, I wanted to share it with the list. John, we need a sanitizer for fax machines now :-) [rcooper via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 24] 0:00 # G!