Tim wrote:

In yet another piece of news, Netcom has apparently been hacked/attacked rather badly. The "netcom.general" discussion group (local to Netcom) is filled with garbage posts, forged posts, cancelled articles, etc. Messages about "root" being forged appeared, then disappeared. Netcom is quiet on this, but has been running "crack" on all of their machines for the last several days--apparently to (somehow?) help to find security flaws....I have no idea why running crack to find weak passwords of users is such a high priority. Maybe the apparent attack is related, maybe not.

Netcom has unauthorized access problems for the longest time. My account has been deleted three times in as many months. Neither sysadmin nor accounting had any explanation or record of the deletion. No, I didn't owe them money. This has not been an isolated incident (see the article about Netcom under the fitting title "Sysadmins without a clue" in the Summer '94 issue of 2600). Netcom states in their announcement in netcom.announce that the passwords compromised were of a type that could be found in a dictionary attack. This would explain why they are running crack. Seems someone else has run crack before them. It also seems that root@netcom.com made the mistake of choosing a pw that is subject to a dictionary attack. Well, sysadmins without a clue. -- Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.