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Scoop is launching a new free emailer today The Sludge Report by C.D. Sludge.
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Author/s of this report will be anonymous and wide ranging. Indeed you are invited to contribute: The format is as a
reporters notebook. It will be published as and when material is available.
C.D. Sludge can be contacted at sludge@scoop.co.nz. The Sludge Report will shortly also be available as a free email service….WATCH THIS SPACE>>>>>
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Mayday 90210 – Beverly Hills
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0005/S00014.htm
Sludge Report #1
Is The Love Bug The Real Thing.
The Love Bug has been an accident waiting to happen for ages. Unprotected internet intercourse dressed in a sugar
coating. If responsibility can be attributed to this, then it is due mainly to Microsoft’s most popular hacker
playground – Outlook Mail. Outlook is a platform of highly penetrable software that has been under attack since first
built. Forget the Justice Department - now Bill Gates has something to really worry about.
Love Bug Interview
Sludge conducted the following interview with a love bug entomologist this morning.
Q: Was the security of the Pentagon and CIA compromised by a love letter?
A: Yes.
Q: Will this knowledge freak out the feds?
A: Yes.
Q: Is there anything they can do about it?
A: Probably not, except get rid of Outlook which would cost millions and would upset Bill Gates greatly. Alternatively
they can start telling people they can’t read email except from “safe” addresses which would rapidly get rid of all the
functionality that the net can deliver.
Q: Why can’t a defence be built?
A: Because there are so many holes in Outlook, it is known so well by the hacker community, and the hackers are hacking
back.
Q: Are there political reasons behind the attack?
A: The authorities media and officials would dearly like everybody to believe this is a random malicious attack by a
teenager but this is not what it is.
Q: Is there any connection to MAYDAY2k
A: A spyder – the name on the love bug – was a correspondent on the Mayday2k list serve some time ago – but that is a
very common email address. To be honest, I don’t know.
Q: Is it a crime in the Philippines to attack the Pentagon and CIA?
A: Probably not.
Q: Does arresting those involved in this make it less or more likely that similar attacks will continue?
A: It makes it more likely. We can safely assume that there is more than one or two people involved in this. These
people are politically motivated. It was a coordinated highly focussed attack on the centre of the Western power complex
the UK Government, the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA. And it was in the form of a love letter.
We can also assume that they will be prepared to be chased.
Q: How did it work.
A: It was incredibly simple and quite small. The virus is a .vbs script. This is a scripting programming language –
Visual Basic - used by Microsoft to control functions within the Microsoft suite of products. It is designed to enable
tasks to be computerised. Unlike an .exe file it is not obviously dangerous but when opened immediately issues
instructions to the computer to perform a task. In this case this was send yourself to every other address in the mail
folder.
In order for the attack to succeed it needed to be sent to a number of addresses probably at each main location
simultaneously so that it would quickly reach out of control proportions and lead to a shut down of the communication
system before it was identified and filtered or countered. The message is designed to encourage itself to be clicked on.
Q: Could it have been worse.
A: It could have been much much worse. The payload could have done all manner of things and the interesting thing the
computer forensic feds will have to figure out is whether there were multiple versions of the script with different
payloads. One could be set up for example to randomly harvest the My Documents folder and send messages out to addresses
in the outlook folder at 1 minute intervals. Effectively your computer would appear to be functioning normally but
actually it is sending all your files out.
Q: What is the most interesting aspect to the latest cyber assault with a love letter?
A: It’s irony.
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Love Bug Had A Message From God – NZ Catholic
A poem in the latest NZ Catholic newspaper – IVA VERSE, Opinion Page.
Email from e-ternity
If we should scan the universe
To search for the Creator
I wonder what search instrument we’d use
To find the data
That scientists might very well
Decide upon Yahoo To call
“Is someone out there?”
Perhaps Ask Jeeves woild do.
Philosophers more inward looking
Keep their thoughts more snug,
For them the chosen service provider
Is probably Ihug
An e-mail from eternity
Beamed in from heaven above
Addressed as message 1 of 1
“Humanity with love”.
Exactly that’s what Jesus is,
A message that’s complete,
So why not take the message in
Before you push Delete
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Naked Chef calls Kim Hill Babe
Jamie Oliver isn’t going to call his new restaurant in Cambridge anything tacky like Naked or Pucker but he does call
Kim Hill “babe” and “darling.” And she doesn’t seem to mind?! Did anyone tell her that East End accents have virtually
disappeared in London - that most practicing cockneys are nice middle class lads who should know better. In an interview
‘Guvnor’ Oliver said he was planning on putting “a bun in the oven” with his wife after checking out Morocco and getting
inspired by books. Oliver says he is gagging for a good breakfast in New Zealand. He is planning a “Full Monty” -
amazing breakfasts in his restaurant back in London..
Sludge Report # 1 - Compiled by - C.D. Sludge – Tuesday, May 09, 2000
© Sludge 2000