Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!voder!pyramid!comdesign!ivucsb!news
From: news@ivucsb.UUCP (Todd Day)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Getting Even
Summary: Irresponsibility
Message-ID: <381@ivucsb.UUCP>
Date: 12 Nov 88 20:32:00 GMT
References: <367@execu.UUCP> <265@acheron.UUCP> <1636@pikes.Colorado.EDU> <1872@sybase.sybase.com>
Reply-To: news@ivucsb.UUCP (Todd Day)
Organization: The Audio Club at UCSB, Isla Vista, California
Lines: 16

In article <1872@sybase.sybase.com> cuccia@chaos.UUCP (Nick Cuccia) writes:
_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.

Why would a computer doing real-time medical monitoring be hooked up
to the network?  If this computer was doing life/death data gathering
and controlling, then I would consider the administrators to be grossly
negligent.  I find it incredible that this sort of thing could happen
at all.  It sounds like WARGAMES!

If a computer has to do anything *important* or has to be highly secure,
why even hook it up to the outside world in the first place?