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ARCHIVE: 'Phage List' - Archives (1988 - 1989)
DOCUMENT: phage #388 [External Exposure of our problem] (1 message, 1238 bytes)
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From: fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu (Erik E. Fair)
To: phage
Date: Fri 05:41:04 04/11/1988 EST
Subject: External Exposure of our problem
References: [Thread Prev: 386] [Thread Next: 023] [Message Prev: 389] [Message Next: 390]

Good morning. As of now, CSNET Relay is down. CSNET will not return
until later today, at the earliest, according to the folks at CSNET.

All the MILNET mailbridges return "host is unreachable" immediately
upon PING from an ARPANET connected host.

Friday's Wall Street Journal has our problem on the front page as
the second item under "What's News - World Wide", with a story on
B4.

Friday's New York Times has our problem on the top of the front
page:  "`Virus' in Military Computers Disrupts Systems Nationwide."
This story says that they (NYT) got an anonymous call from a friend
of an anonymous CS grad student somewhere in the northeast let this
thing loose as an experiment, and didn't know that it reinfected
infected systems until it had already escaped out to the Internet.

I've heard that the story has been on NPR, ABC Radio News, and got
play on tonight's TV news. It is also supposedly in in Thursday's San
Francisco Examiner (copy, anyone?)

I plan on scanning these articles and posting their content to the
list as soon as I get ahold of a scanner with OCR software at Apple,
which, coincidentally, I had arranged on Wednesday for something
entirely different.

The worm (it's not a virus, it hasn't, so far as I've heard, attacked
any other existing binaries) attempted to attack Apple, but because
our network connection has been flaky, it was unsucessful at getting
a copy of the listener to run. I am thus dependent upon you all
for analysis of this thing. I await details with breathless antici...
pation!

	Yow! Are We Having Fun YET?

	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu

P.S.	We'd better start thinking about the aftermath of this thing.
	How much of the Internet is going to go apeshit paranoid?
	Thank [your deity of choice here] that the Senior Senator
	from Wisconsin has retired.

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