North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: remember the lesson of the sendsys bomb
Hi. What was you talking about? Wait a few days and compare the bills; don't wonder seen '290% fee or 1024 hours/day', or 'we can not measure your login time'. Real problems are waiting for us yet. On Fri, 31 Dec 1999, Paul A Vixie wrote: > Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 23:13:25 -0800 > From: Paul A Vixie <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Subject: remember the lesson of the sendsys bomb > > > at the 1988 usenix in san francisco, rick adams of uunet ran the uucp bof and > told a story of a forged sendsys message intended to melt somebody's inbox. > this was timed to coincide with a usenix, since most news admins would be at > the show rather than home watching their servers. (shows did not have terminal > rooms at that time.) thus the cats were away the mice were at play. > > (sendsys, for those of you not in the news field, is a 'control message' that > used to be used to get a news-neighbor to send their "sys" file via e-mail; > this was used for debugging and early access controls on it were nonexistent.) > > well, most of the news servers by that time were configured to mail all such > control messages to their local administrator, who could then approve them by > hand if they weren't stupid and abusive (which they almost always were). so > the forger's intent of inundating some victim's inbox with thousands of "sys" > files from autoresponding systems seemed destined for some frustration. > > except that so many admins were away and had set up "vacation" autoresponders > saying "hi, i'm at usenix, i'll be back on friday" and so few of these vacation > robots had enough intelligence to not autorespond to other robotic e-mail such > as "sendsys message received - approval required" that the news system ended > up melting the victim's inbox ANYWAY. > > the lesson of the sendsys is that after a 24 or 36 hour period of continuous > wakefulness, sean and alan and the rest are going to have to SLEEP. *that* > will be the time when some perfectly normal event like a route spew or heavy > flap or genetic IOS defect will make itself known, and *that* will be the time > when Y2K finally kicks us all in the head. not because of the date change, > but because everybody stayed awake too long and upset their normal vigilence. > > Aleksei Roudnev, (+1 415) 585-3489 /San Francisco CA/
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