July 12th, 2005
Best Security Story of the Week
Jo Best over at Silicon.com gets my vote for writing the most entertaining security story of the week.
Two hilarious things about this story on Gary McKinnon, the UK’s infamous NASA hacker who spent a lot of time roaming around NASA’s network. First, his allogations that NASA has a bunch of non-terrestrial officers and ships. (If only it were true!) The caveat to his discovery:
McKinnon, however, said he can’t remember much about the project as he had been “smoking a lot of dope at the time”.
The next comments are not so funny, they are scary and have the ring of truth to them that any white hat hacker will recognize:
McKinnon continued: “Once you’re on the network, you can do a command called NetStat - Network Status - and it lists all the connections to that machine. There were hackers from Denmark, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Thailand… every night for the entire five to seven years I was doing this.”
Richard Stiennon is an industry consultant. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
