Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!ucdavis!TEdell
From: TEdell@ucdavis.edu (Thomas E Dell)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: liability (was Re: virus et al.)
Keywords: internet virus sun spaf weemba
Message-ID: <3259@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Date: 8 Nov 88 10:22:29 GMT
References: <5331@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Sender: uucp@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu
Distribution: na
Organization: University of California, Davis
Lines: 15

In article <5331@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> spaf@cs.purdue (Spafford) writes:

>a class action suit could be filed for millions, not $10K.  I suspect
>that Sun Microsystems will expend a few $100K on this -- not only to
>eradicate the worm in their internal network, but they will have the
>expense of FedEx'ing copies of patches to all their sites under
>maintenance.  DEC will have similar costs.  Then there is BBN and....

No one other than Sun should be liable for expenses incurred in distributing
bug fixes pertaining to security holes, regardless of how the holes were
discovered. They ARE there, and they are not present due to fault of any
hypothetical Cornell students..


--------
TEdell@ucdavis.edu  dell@ames-nas.arpa