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Famous Breakins in Infosec
Mike Hudack
Editor-in-Chief
Recent attacks are common knowledge among those interested in infosec. But what about thsoe in the early days -- from `84 to `95?
1984:
A branch manager in a bank changes some code in a computer to avoid audit checking. He then transfers $25 million to his own accounts.
1988:
Robert Morris releases the infamous Internet Worm attack by accident -- disabling or slowing more than seven thousand hosts. The attack uses vulnerabilities in FINGERD, RHOST and SENDMAIL. CERT was created after this attack to prevent future catastrophies of this magnitude.
1988:
Friday the 13th virus at Hebrew University in Jerusalem infects thousands of students and faculty. It was scheduled to erase or destroy the hard disks of infected computer. Caused damage at the Royal National Institute for the Blind (England) and also in the US later.
1988:
White House security systems are considered insecure when the Tower Commission explored the computers used by Ollie North. They find that sensitive files implicating several in the Iran-Contra Scandal have been deleted from terminals but not from the mainframe.
1989:
Cliff Stoll faces off against intruders from East Germany who are trying to infiltrate US military computers. He was an astronomer (temporarily employed as a sysadmin) at a college in California. When he discovered a seventy-five cent accounting error in supercomputer time, he decided to investigate -- catching the intruders in the act.
1989:
A 14-year-old Kansas student penetrates the Air Force Satellite positioning system. Using an Apple computer, he had the ability to redirect Air Force satellites -- although he didn´t. He also browsed through confidential files of more than two hundred businesses.
1993:
In New York City, an Internet "public access" system reported that userIDs and passwords were being stolen. They were garnered using weaknesses in SENDMAIL. Ironically, the intrusion was discovered when a sysadmin typoed and entered the intruder´s files.
1995:
Source Address Spoofing attack reported by CERT. At least fifty hosts fell victim to the attack, which spoofed IP addresses to gain entry to systems which used IP-specific usage filtering.
1995:
Vladimir Levin uses computers to access Citibank´s fund transfer system in Manhatten. He entered the system more than fourty times, eventually transferring more than $10 million to other accounts. He and four other suspects were arrested and all but $400,000 was recovered. |
