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Another Hacker Targets PCs
By
JON SWARTZ
San Francisco Chronicle
In a possible slap at Microsoft Corp., a mysterious hacker
unleashed a virtual assault on thousands of Windows-based
machines nationwide late Monday and early Tuesday. The attack
happened just hours before Microsoft CEO Bill Gates testified
before the Senate on the company's business practices,
authorities said Wednesday. Based on the timing and the fact
that it targeted Windows machines, authorities suspect the
hacker aimed the assault at the software firm.
The wide-scale cyberattack disabled computers at nine of NASA's
10 field offices, the Navy, the University of California at
Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and several other colleges.
Computer experts called the break- in a ``denial of service''
attack that shut down systems without altering or erasing data.
``Our systems locked up and crashed,'' said Mike Mewhinney, a
spokesman for the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View,
which was affected. ``A computer user would see a blue screen
with an error message displayed.''
Computer experts said the attack exploited a bug in the Windows
95 and NT operating systems known as ``Teardrop II,'' which
causes data to overload and lock up computer systems. Macintosh
machines were not affected by the assault.
Mewhinney said the attack, which lasted until Tuesday morning,
forced computer users to restart their machines. Microsoft has
issued a free software patch on its Web site
(http://www.microsoft.com/security) to fix disabled machines.
Jesus Mena, a spokesman for UC Berkeley, said the university
quickly built a safety border around its computer network within
an hour of the attack.
UC Berkeley and NASA officials did not disclose the number of
machines shut down in the online raid.
Peter Neumann, a computer security expert at SRI International
in Menlo Park, and others said they were not surprised by the
attack. They claim Microsoft and America Online are common
targets for hackers because of their ``mass marketing approach
to technology.''
The software giant has become a pinata of sorts for a growing
number of high-tech and government critics. On Tuesday, Gates
was grilled by a hostile Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on
the company's business methods. And the government is suing
Microsoft in an antitrust case.
The identity of the online intruder is not known, sources said.
The hacker attack is the second high-profile case in less than a
week. Two teenage hackers from Cloverdale are suspected of
repeatedly breaking into the Pentagon's computer system to view
unclassified information.
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(The San Francisco Chronicle Web site is at
http://www.sfgate.com.)
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Received on Fri Mar 13 16:59:35 1998