Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!yale!cmcl2!acf3!rosenblg
From: rosenblg@acf3.NYU.EDU (Gary J. Rosenblum)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Worm/Passwords
Message-ID: <2210005@acf3.NYU.EDU>
Date: 10 Nov 88 07:40:00 GMT
References: <22401@cornell.UUCP>
Organization: New York University
Lines: 24

It is hard to save people from themselves, as well.  Time and
time again we tell our users, "Don't use your first name, last
name, name spelled backwards, any info in your .plan or finger
info, etc." as your password.  Still, they do, and their passwords 
are easy to guess (this is not an invitation for anyone to try, though!)

On another note, today I found a student running this wonderful
little ditty, which he named oddly enough virus.c:

main() { while (1) fork (); }

and he effectively halted a small vax (11/750).  The immediate
reaction of the powers-that-be, and I must confess I feel this way
at the moment as well, is to make an example of this person to the 
user community.  So now some stupid little prank will go on the
person's undergrad record (not a big deal overall, but it puts the
"fear of God into him" as one administrator said to me).  Just 
because this worm, whatever your opinion is of it, received an 
overabundance of press coverage.

Gary J. Rosenblum			gary@nyu.edu
UNIX Systems Manager			New York University

"Dewar still thinks our class was the best he ever had!"  :^)