This, from today's *The Australian*, implies a real marketing problem for MSFT, and perhaps a real strategic problem for lotsa people. We live in times that seem bound to become more interesting yet ...
And I just had to smile at that bit about Russians' apparent penchant for the hack - reminds me of that priceless bit in Toffler et al's famous 'magna carta for the knowledge age', in which we are told that only the American culture produces the hacker; that it is a necessary and healthy by product of the American's commitment to freedom blah yadda blush.
Cheers, Rob.
No one is safe from new style of hacker
From Los Angeles correspondent
Robert Lusetich
30oct00
COMPUTER security experts warned
yesterday that no one was safe from
a dangerous new breed of hacker, as
Microsoft sought to downplay the
most significant security breach in its
history.
Using "worms" that are transmitted through innocuous-looking emails with attachments, like one recently developed in China, hackers are able to partially control any computer and recover information at will without the victim even noticing.
Allen Paller, director of System Administrators Networking and Security Institution in Washington DC, predicted that "what you saw at Microsoft is a lightweight problem to what you will see in the next 12 months" as hackers become even more sophisticated.
The ubiquitous computer giant, which provides the software for more than 90 per cent of the world's computers, said none of the invaluable source codes for its various products were compromised, though source codes for future products were viewed during a week-long infiltration.
"You bet this is an issue of great importance," said chief executive Steve Ballmer.
But some security experts have questioned whether Microsoft is not minimising the damage done in the attack and warn that corrupted source codes could debilitate computers all over the world.
Weld Pond, of web security firm @Stake Inc, said the "scariest scenario" involved hackers planting "some sort of weakness into the Windows or Office code and it's pretty much undetectable". "They could ... make every Microsoft user vulnerable."
A hacker used a sophisticated Trojan Horse program to access the personal computer of a Microsoft employee, unleashed unwittingly when an email was opened two weeks ago.
From there, the hacker collected user names and passwords of other Microsoft employees and entered the company's system, retrieving internal information that was then sent to an email account in St Petersburg, Russia.
The involvement of St Petersburg is most troubling for Microsoft because it is a favourite haunt for the world's best hackers -- though they rarely live there -- and also the unofficial capital of the Russian mafia.
"You can operate there as a hacker with a fair level of confidence you won't get caught," said Simon Perry, a New York-based computer security expert.
"The technology doesn't exist to track them down. Also, the laws don't exist to prosecute them."