Reply From: Rick Low <rlow@ewa-canada.com> At 03:35 PM 4/15/99 -0600 you said: >Philip Loranger, chief of the Command and Control Protect Division in the >Army's Information Assurance Office, demonstrated how anyone can attack a >network and turn on any camera or microphones connected to that network >with what he called "not very sophisticated hacker tools'' downloaded from >the Internet. I saw the same demo by Mr. Loranger at a different location, and was underwhelmed. >Loranger, who conducted an attack on a dial-up military network in >Columbia, Md., from an Association of U.S. Army Information Assurance >symposium in Falls Church, Va., said the .mil system he managed to >penetrate -- and whose identity he would not disclose... The LAN looked to me (from reconnaissance part of the demo) like it was in his own office area. I got the feeling he uses the same captive target network every time he does the demo. >Once inside the network, Loranger said he then probed the network and >discovered a "read/write password file'' that allowed him to delete the >"super-user'' password, allowing him to create a super-user password for >himself, giving him free reign over the system. This is the bit of hand waving where I became completely skeptical. The box he attacked in the demo I attended appeared to be a Linux installation. The world-writeable /etc/passwd was just too much to believe. At a time when there are so many legitimate exploits out there that could have been used, this demo strained credibility. >From Mr Loranger's talk, it is clear that this demo is intended to impress on politicians and bureaucrats the main issues in Internet attacks. That it does, in a slick package. But the "live attack" part bent the needle on my crap detector meter. --rick low Richard A. Low, P.Eng. EWA-Canada Ltd. Ottawa, Canada +1 (613) 230-6067 x228 mailto:rlow@ewa-canada.com http://www.ewa-canada.com -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Hacker News Network [www.hackernews.com]
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