Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!unisoft!mtxinu!sybase!chaos!cuccia
From: cuccia@chaos.UUCP (Nick Cuccia)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Getting Even
Message-ID: <1872@sybase.sybase.com>
Date: 8 Nov 88 01:20:49 GMT
References: <367@execu.UUCP> <265@acheron.UUCP> <1636@pikes.Colorado.EDU>
Sender: news@sybase.sybase.com
Reply-To: cuccia@chaos.UUCP (Nick Cuccia)
Organization: Sybase, Inc.
Lines: 31

In article <1636@pikes.Colorado.EDU> netnews@pikes.Colorado.EDU (Usenet News) writes:

> Furthermore, If this individual wanted to cause great damage to other machines
> it would have been done.  The fact that he created an experiment that was
> non distructive and even cleaned up after itself shows true realization of 
> the potential for distruction.

Depends on what you want to call "non-destructive."  If you're talking about
the loss of files or corruption of data, then yeah, the worm was non-
destructive.

But if you consider the amount of time that thousands of people had to spend
to deal with the worm (or, for non-Internet sites, the threat of the worm),
add that to the amount of system downtime (interrupting ongoing experiments
or calculations) in many computer centers, and then add that to the loss of
connectivity that the worm has caused, and you start to accumulate serious
bucks, not to mention inconvenience.

And, in any case, the virus could've caused some serious damage, especially
if it infected a machine doing sensitive real-time work; Stoll (in _Stalking
the Wily Hacker_) remarked that at one point the hacker that was being tracked
stumbled onto a machine doing real-time medical monitoring; care to imagine
the same machine being infected by many copies of the "benign" virus that
was seen this past week?  I sure don't.

> Robert M. Sklar - News Administrator @ CU-Denver

--Nick
===============================================================================
 Nick Cuccia				       System Admin/Postmaster, Sybase
 sybase!cuccia@sun.com              {mtxinu,sun,pyramid,pacbell}!sybase!cuccia
	      Me?  Speak for my company?  You're kidding, right?