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Ken Williams Letter
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Hey,
i just got off the phone with one of the Harvard Network
managers. John Vranesevich contacted Harvard this morning
and threatened to sue them because of the content in the
jp/ directory. I was told that the situation quickly escalated
to the Harvard Office of General Counsel.
The result: the server and the web site and it's contents
are permanently offline, I have no access to even retrieve
anything off of the server, the site known as "Packet Storm"
is history now. All of the content and the backups made are
either destroyed, being destroyed now, or will be before I can
do anything to prevent it.
Harvard is facing a lawsuit from JP, I am facing a lawsuit from
JP, and possibly some sort of legal action from Harvard.
This has turned really ugly, really quickly, and it is very
plausible that Harvard may try to pull a "we caught a hacker /
Randal Schwartz / Intel" kind of bullshit so they can free
themselves of any liability, and use me as the fall guy for
this whole thing. All agreements with Harvard in the beginning
were verbal (with Jeff Gray, the senior sysadmin), so I've
got nothing on paper to back up the truth. It is very plausible,
even probable, now that I will be facing charges involving
"hacking" or computer crimes of some sort, because I "never
had a Harvard ID, and thus was not authorized to use their
facilities", and I "compromised their security." I guess it
doesn't matter that I was contacted by the Senior Sysadmin at
Harvard and invited to move my site there. It doesn't matter
that he placed the box on a subnet of his choosing and called
me and gave me the root password and told me I had free rein on
the box. It doesn't matter that Harvard network security was
never actually compromised.
If that's not enough to annoy me, all of my class work for
the class I'm taking at NCSU this summer is on that server
at Harvard and gone now too. With 4 weeks left in the
semester here at NCSU, I have just lost seven weeks of work and
data that cannot be replaced in 4 weeks.
What bothers me the most is that all of the countless hours I
put into that web site and the archives, thousands of hours,
are gone now, for good.
The site was getting over 400,000 hits/day and doing about
10 GB/day in transfers, so I don't see it coming back online
even if I do get any of the site content back.
Obviously, I have taken full responsibility for the site
content and all activities and events associated with that
server, and consequently am now facing legal actions from both
JP and Harvard, and state/federal computer crime charges as well.
I don't really mind being buried in a grave I dug for myself,
but I'm damn pissed to look up and see that John Vranesevich
is the jackass shoveling in the dirt.
What am I going to do now? I don't know. The web site I
devoted most of my waking hours to is gone. My chances of
passing my csc499 class do not look good, according to my
professor.
If JP wasn't such a sorry waste of human life, I'd take a trip
to Beaver, PA ....
Until formal charges are filed, I've still got my job and
account here at NCSU. If NCSU catches wind of any of this,
and I'm sure they will, my account will be permanently revoked,
and my job and the past three years of grad school will be
gone. Until then, I can be contacted at the email address
in the sig below.
maybe I'll see ya round sometime.
take it easy,
Ken Williams
jkwilli2@unity.ncsu.edu
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