excerpted from: RISKS-FORUM Digest Tuesday 5 October 1993 Volume 15 : Issue 06 - -- Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1993 11:43:00 -0600 From: tmplee@tis.com (Theodore M.P. Lee) Subject: RISKs of trusting e-mail Until such time as either the general population learns what to expect or digital authentication (such as PEM) becomes widespread, I suspect we will hear more of this kind of incident. This academic year the University of Wisconsin started providing e-mail accounts to all students at its Madison campus. (6,000?, maybe) The students, both technical and non-technical, are being encouraged to use e-mail as a way of interacting with their instructors. They access the accounts either through University-supplied machines scattered throughout the campus or through dial-up Serial Link Protocol (SLIP) connections. A mix of Macintosh's, PC's and other assorted workstations are involved. Last week (note how early in the school year) a group of five students, several from the Honors floor of one of the freshman dorms, were caught having forged several pieces of e-mail. Most potentially damaging was a note saying it was from the Director of Housing, to the Chancellor of the University, David Ward; note that the previous Chancellor is now Pres. Clinton's Secretary of HHS, so the present Chancellor is new to the job. The forged message was a submission of resignation. Ward's secretary had just returned from vacation and apparently assumed the proferred resignation was legitimate. The secretary accepted it and started to act upon it -- it was only during the course of that that it was discovered to be a fake. The students also sent messages purporting to be from the Chancellor to other students asking them to pay their tuition. They also forged a message from the Chancellor (my information doesn't say who it went to) saying he was going to "come out of the closet" and announce it Sept. 25. The students were only caught through a combination of circumstances. First, since they used one of the dial-in connections there were logs of who dialed in when. Secondly, during the course of their experiments they botched some addresses which caused enough traffic to go to the dead-letter office that the investigation could narrow what was happening. (It should be pointed out that the forgery was fairly easy to accomplish using the Eudora mail client on a Macintosh: the user has complete choice over the "from:" field of a message.) The FBI is investigating whether any federal crime was involved and, needless-to-say, the students are likely to be expelled at the least. Ted Lee, Trusted Information Systems, Inc., PO Box 1718, Minnetonka, MN 55345 612-934-5424 tmplee@tis.com Paul Ferguson | privacy \'pri-va-see\ n, pl, -cies; Mindbank Consulting Group | 1: the quality or state of being apart Fairfax, Virginia USA | from others 2: secrecy fergp@sytex.com | ferguson@icp.net | Privacy -- Use it or lose it.