[236] in Intrusion Detection Systems
Re: Jim Truitt's request for information about SAIC's CMDS
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter G. Neumann)
Fri May 19 23:16:13 1995
From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Date: Fri, 19 May 95 17:29:31 PDT
To: ids@uow.edu.au
Reply-To: ids@uow.edu.au
Date: 19 May 1995
Cc: Grant L. Clark, Corporate Counsel, SAIC, by U.S. Mail
If you were receiving mail posted to ids@uow.edu.au as of 25 August 1994, or
if you were not a recipient at that time but have somehow acquired access to
messages dating back that far, please read this message very carefully.
Otherwise, you may ignore this message completely, in which case I apologize
for the intrusion (!).
On Thu, 25 Aug 1994, 14:13:17 PDT, I accidentally posted a message to this
unmoderated list in response to Jim Truitt's request for information about
SAIC's CMDS. This resulted from inadvertence on my part, because I had
intended my reply to go personally only to Jim and to no one else (the
message was marked "In-reply-to Jim Truitt") -- and indeed my message began,
"Jim, ". Unfortunately, it was redistributed to the list. However, as I
recall, my message received no replies from anyone else, so I hoped it had
been duly ignored. At the time there were very few of folks who were on the
ids distribution list. (Please note that I am not repeating my earlier
message here, because to do so would only compound the problem. Thus, if
you don't know what I am talking about, it clearly does not affect you, and
you can stop reading this message now.)
In a letter dated 17 May 1995 from Grant L. Clark, SAIC's Corporate Counsel,
I have been asked to publically withdraw that message (irrespective of
whether any archived copies of it remain anywhere), and to issue a complete
and unequivocal retraction of my message. The message that you are now
reading constitutes my request for complete expungement, as well as a
complete and unequivocal retraction of that message in the medium in which
it originally appeared. If you were receiving E-mail to ids@uow.edu.au last
August and still have a copy of my message, please act accordingly and
delete any copies you may have kept, and completely disregard its contents.
If you forwarded it anywhere else, please send this message to everyone to
whom you forwarded it. If you were not receiving E-mail to ids@uow.edu.au
at that time, you may disregard this notice unless you have somehow
subsequently obtained a copy of that message -- in which case you should
expunge it.
To SAIC, I apologize for any aggravation or offense that you may have been
caused. My August 1994 message was intended as a private message and there
was absolutely no willful or malicious intent to injure SAIC's reputation in
the marketplace. I regretted then and still do regret that the message went
out to the ids list. I have not repeated, reiterated, or otherwise
disseminated that message or any similar message in ids or any other on-line
medium or indeed in any other medium. My August 1994 message began with "To
the best of my knowledge, ..." Evidentally my knowledge was faulty, and I
was misinformed. You may also note that my August 1994 message explicitly
said, "Perhaps someone from SAIC can correct me." No one from SAIC ever
said anything. That is unfortunate, because the record could have been
corrected long ago. I am not going to explicitly refute individual words in
my message, because to do so would require that I repeat the message --
which, under the circumstances, would be totally inappropriate.
For the benefit of ids readers, this message probably affects only a handful
of you. If you have read this far, I appreciate your having done so. I
think this note provides one more reason for subscribing only to moderated
newsgroups (a theme which I rather coincidentally posted to this newsgroup
earlier today!). For those of you who actually remember reading my earlier
message, you might let me know whether you still had a copy and, if so, let
me know that you have actually deleted it.
For the benefit of SAIC, I note a variety of peripheral circumstances
relating to ids. The ids mailings were (and still are) very informal and to
my knowledge not then or even now universally available as an Internet- or
Usenet-style newsgroup. The E-mail sent through ids@uow.edu.au was in the
early days available to just a few people who were actively involved in the
development and application of analytic tools that could improve computer
security. The list has since grown considerably, but was VERY small last
August. The ids remailer is completely unmoderated. All messages sent to
ids@uow.edu.au are automatically indirected to whomever is on the list at
the time. Unmoderated remailers are inherently risky, as I have noted in
this medium on various occasions. The Reply-To: ids@uow.edu.au field causes
all responses to be broadcast to the list unless overt action is taken to
direct a reply only to the sender. Direct remailers (as opposed to
newsgroups) are generally set up so that it is impossible to cancel a
submitted message that is instantly rebroadcast. There were very few
readers actually receiving ids as of August 1994, and newly added recipients
do not receive back messages. To my (perhaps incomplete) knowledge, there
is no public archival source of ids messages dating back to August 1994,
although private copies may have been kept by people with nothing better to
think about, because only a few of the unmoderated ids messages are of
lasting value.
Peter G. Neumann
Computer Science Lab
SRI International
Menlo Park CA 94025
(a not-for-profit research organization)
