Reply From: Felix von Leitner <leitner@math.fu-berlin.de>
Thus spake mea culpa (jericho@dimensional.com):
> 07May98 USA: 'FLIPPERGATE' ASSAULT BY US NAVY SINKS IN BATH.
This whole issue just screams "disinformation" to me.
> to the company's technology. Yet rather than trumpet 'Flippergate' as
> evidence of its prowess, Lotus is strangely silent on the whole subject.
> This remarkable reticence may not be unconnected with the fact that its
> biggest single customer is the US military.
Any company with government contracts has to build in back-doors in
their software for the NSA. So Lotus knows that the military would have
had no problems whatsoever to break into that site.
Most companies that want to export security related software have to put
in back doors, too. Lotus had to place 16 of the 40 bits of their DES
implementation with the NSA so they could break keys more easily.
Besides, no hacker in his right mind would attack from home (in this
case from navy.mil). Any admin with half a brain can trace attacks.
IF the attacks really came from hq.navy.mil, it was probably a spoofed
DNS entry by some prankster.
Felix
-o-
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Received on Tue May 12 07:41:26 1998