Picking at a Virus-Ridden Corpse, Part II

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Picking at a Virus-Ridden Corpse, Part II

9/24/2003

By Terry CalhounBy , Joe St Sauver

5. Virtually No One's Really Serious About Desktop Workstation Security.
I'm willing to bet that the recent viruses resulted in hundreds, if not thousands, of compromised systems on each of your campuses.
No one's watching, so let's be perfectly candid: were all those compromised systems low-level formatted and reinstalled from scratch? No? Are you really, really, comfortable that all those patched-but-not-fully-reinstalled-from-scratch machines don't have any lingering, virus-created "back doors" that just haven't been noticed yet? No?

And if a virus on those machines had completely wiped out the hard drive on each of those infested systems, would each have had a current backup? Would you at least have had a backup of the important stuff that you can't otherwise re-create?

Trust me, virtually no one's really serious about desktop workstation security. If such people exist, they would have reinstalled from scratch, using backups that most of us probably didn't have.

6. It's Not Just the Viruses and Worms.
It is really easy to get tunnel vision and think that viruses/worms are the only security threat you face. They're not.
At the same time you're dealing with viruses and worms, you should also be thinking about the steps that you'll take to deal with at least one other major security vulnerability this year.

Maybe that's physical security: What could someone with a sledge hammer and five gallons of unleaded gasoline do to your physical infrastructure?
Or maybe this is the year to go after plain-text passwords on the wire: ssh makes a nice drop in replacement for yelnet, and you can comparatively easily TLS-enable most POP and IMAP clients and servers now, just to mention two areas where encryption has come a long way without much fanfare.

In Conclusion . . .
There are plenty more lessons we could learn from these most recent infestations, but let's just stop at 10. If we can do these ten, or even some of these ten, we'll be making great progress.

J'e St Sauver, Ph.D., is Director of User Services and Network Applications., University of Oregon Computing Center. He can be reached at j'e@oregon.uoregon.edu

We know that everyone is working hard and with inadequate resources. If you’ll read back a few issues, you’ll note that, about the way folks handled the mess when the students came back to campus, we wrote: "on campus after campus, the IT staff came through with shining colors." J'e’s main point may be that you should just occasionally ask yourself whether you are about to do the lazy/expeditious thing, or the right thing – not in terms of reacting to a crisis, but in light of what might be the consequences down the road.

Joe St Sauver, Ph.D. (joe@oregon.uoregon.edu) is the director of user services and network applications at the University of Oregon Computing Center.

Cite this Site

, Joe St Sauver, "Picking at a Virus-Ridden Corpse, Part II," Campus Technology, 9/24/2003, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=39508

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