North American Network Operators Group

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The FBI tripping over itself again

  • From: Kai Schlichting
  • Date: Tue Oct 31 14:50:45 2000

In case any participants of NANOG 20 had any confidence left in the
FBI after their Carniwhore presentation and getting shit from
an attendee for an apparent illegal wiretap without a warrant
in a network owned by said attendee's company, check this out:

FBI confiscates computers of "curious" RPI student in aftermath
of the yankees.com hack: Sounds like Operation Sundevil all over
again (that one having gone down under SS direction):

http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2000/10/31/0481/1037
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/10/31/025228.shtml

If this gets a message across to network providers and individuals
alike: The FBI is wasting your time, their own time and should be
ignored and avoided at all cost.

Imminent fall-out:
Networks under my control (and more so some I've been called in
to assist) are currently under attack by SMTP dictionary-attackers,
which seems to be reincarnations of the ghosts of GeolistPro. 
 [ scumbags that are trying to deliver spam, and/or are trying to
   learn  every possible email address in a given domain, to the
   tune of up to 550,000 per attack (there's obviously a lot of
   [email protected] scraped from existing spam-lists). Did you ever
   have 500,000 mails in your Lotus Notes mail spool, because the
   product (by default) is too dumb to discard undeliverables
   and keeps them nicely for the postmaster to review ? This
   even brings Quad-PIII/600Mhz machines with 2GB of RAM to its
   knees. Now think of the attackers reselling these 500,000
   'confirmed' email addresses to other spammers...the future
   damages of this bogus "data collection" will quickly reach
   10,000's of dollars)
Does the LE community honestly believe that I will encourage the
owners of these networks to contact the authorities instead of
suing the shit out the attackers in civil court instead? I
didn't think so...

And as far as this concerns this fucked up incident at RPI:
Dear Almighty, please shine some clue rays down on Albany and Troy
(apart from RPI, that's one VERY fucked up and run-down town),
two towns that are badly in need of such grace, along with
the local FBI office, which seems staffed by people who need
to do a few more runs thru the Reston FLETC for 'computer training'
(that moved to Quantico?), because the first time obviously didn't
improve their clue level a whole lot and just caused confusion.
(Hey Kim C., after 7 years, you still have a lot of work left to
do with 'dem bloody recruits)