Computer Security Weekly, April 3, 2000


Itching to get your (electronic) hands on the new Stephen King e-novel? Well, it might be a good idea not to get the Glassbook version. One RISKS reader had his WinNT system trashed by the reader installation. The culprit seems to have been the anti-piracy software. Of course, it would probably be easier to get one of the cracked copies that are flying around. Yes, the publishing industry has found, once again, that they don't know how to secure their products.

More on the Peacefire "crackers" who released a tool (cphack) for finding out what Cyber Patrol is actually filtering (March 20). The Peacefire site has had detailed instructions on how to overcome the information hiding for months. The legal action seems to have come only after it was found, and published, that over three quarters of sites are blocked in error.

http://www.peacefire.org http://censorware.org/reports/utah/ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/03...

More on the US government attack on anonymity (March 20, again). The ACLU has gotten into the act, calling the proposal nothing more than an attempt to erode privacy and free-speech protections.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/bus...

Windmail is a Windows console program that gives you command line email capability. Because of this, it is being used in CGI applications on Windows NT Web servers where email is important. Unfortunately, it does not do sufficient parameter checking, and appears to allow execution of arbitrary commands on the system.

http://www.geocel.com/download/wmail301e...

Spam is being used for increasingly repugnant purposes. The family of a man charged with first degree murder is using a Web site to inundate officials with email.

http://insidedenver.com:80/news/0325spam...

PrettyPark is getting pretty prevalent. The most popular antiviral packages won't deal with it, so the following site has manual disinfection instructions. Please note that these are for experts only, and note that the Registry should be backed up before any editing.

http://antivirus.about.com/library/howto...

Did you hear about the Welsh hacker who stole Bill Gates credit card? So did Reuters, and a number of major papers and news media. Nobody seems to have noticed that the number of digits in the credit card number is incorrect, Bill Gates middle initial is wrong, and that Bill Gates owns a company called "microsfot."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=0001165... http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/arti...

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The copyright of the article Computer Security Weekly, April 3, 2000 in Computer Security is owned by Robert Slade. Permission to republish Computer Security Weekly, April 3, 2000 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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