🚀 go-pugleaf

seagull@netcom.com (Seagull) writes:
>This, IMHO, is not.  So your solution is to give every two-bit idiot
>that doesn't have the brains to be a cracker, but enough brains to read
>and be dangerous a sure-fire way of becoming 'root' on your system?  How
>many crackers do you think there are in the world?  How many cracker-
>wannabe's are there?  I'll bet you everything I own that the second group
>is larger than the first.

Who gives a damn?

We had a cracker-wannabe peg us with one of 8LGM scripts, because I
thought I had closed that hole when I hadn't.

But he was easier to track (not being very adept at covering his tracks)
than a serious cracker, and we were able to close the hole.  If there
hadn't been an exploit script or explicit description of the problem
around somewhere, I wouldn't have even known about the problem, and
while we may not have had to deal with this wannabe, we probably WOULD
have had to deal with someone exploiting something we didn't even
understand or know about.  I was extremely relieved when the guy
said that he'd just run this script that exploited that hole, because
I *knew what he was talking about* and I also knew I could fix it simply.

I want to know the holes, and get them closed.

I don't want to be kept in the dark with bullshit like "exploit scripts
withheld until a patch is available".  I'm sad to see 8lgm reduced to
nearly worthless information now.  I have 4 or 5 advisories from them
recently that seem important, but I have no way to verify and no time
to spend digging them up myself, so we're probably going to end up
vulnerable until someone who *isn't* just a wannaby and doesn't rely on
such obscurity riddled methods of communication comes along and kicks us
over.  That's even more of a waste of my time than being told in advance
what the problem is and usually being able to patch it up before the
wannabes get very far with it.
-- 
Pete Hartman		       Bradley University	pwh@bradley.bradley.edu
 I fear we have not gotten rid of "God" because we still have faith in grammar