[435] in Athena User Interface
Re: Fwd: breakins to some MIT Linux machines (Case 185834)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Tue Sep 19 08:50:18 2000
Message-Id: <200009191250.IAA07058@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: wdc@MIT.EDU
cc: lcs@MIT.EDU, ops@MIT.EDU, aui@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 08:50:14 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
> Beland: bad news, apparently on Sunday after you installed all the
> nice HelixCode stuff, dig-dug got violated. I don't think it's the
> case that the new HelixCode stuff listens on port 39168.
Grr.
> Was dig-dug running Athena 8.4 when it was compromised? 8.4 doesn't
> have the daemon that's been the biggest attack vector recently
> (rpc.statd), so I'm curious how it was compromised.
It was, in fact, running vanilla Redhat 6.2 with Helix Code Gnome.
Come to think of it, I may have forgotten to install the RedHat
post-release updates after I installed the Gnome updates, which could
explain the fast compromise. Though I'd be interested to know what
vulnerability was used to get in. (For instance, we've yet to
security-audit the Gnome code that makes network connections.)
> P.S. I guess we really DO need that test-cluster-w92 email list. If
> Mike Barker hadn't forwarded this to me, it's unclear the news would
> have reached the right people.
That would be handy...
> The reason for that was that the HelixCode distribution installs
> just fine on vanilla RedHat but not on Athenized RedHat. Dunno why,
> and am not totally sure that's the true background.
Hmm. It might be that the Helix Code install will work alongside
Athena, though it could affect AUI logins. Over the summer, we were
building some things (like gtkzephyr) that had problems with the
way Athena does Kerberos.
We could try putting Helix Code on Athena 8.4, as it would be handy to
have AFS and whatnot while playing with Nautilus and Evolution.
-B.
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Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
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