Microsoft's recent sacking at the hands of unskilled malicious crackers has engendered a vast cloud of false scent from company flacks, who in past days have progressively shrunk their damage assessments. According to company sources, the intruders had
Access for only 12 days, not six weeks as first reported, and did not corrupt any software in development.
Others note that, twelve days or not, the intruders can't have helped stealing the source code for the new versions of Windows ME/2K and Office, and might well have implanted back doors, laying the foundation for easy remote e
XPloitation once the finished prod
UCts reach the marketplace.
So, were the walls of the castle breached? Was the digital diadem of William Perfidious defiled by the grubby hands of the unwashed? Or did a handful of malicious kiddies manage nothing more than to give the Kingdom of Gates a scare? We don't pretend to know; but we're going to walk you through the likely steps the intruders would have taken, and let you decide how much damage they might, or might not, have done.
Barbarians at the gate Network security becomes increasingly difficult as point-and-drool cracking tools proliferate. So many painfully easy-to-use appz have been developed in recent years that persistence is now a far more reliable predictor of success than skill: even a newbie cracker can succeed by using pat scripts and casting his nets wide enough.
