Archives for 2004

The report of a preliminary investigation into the Senate file pilfering has been released (in two parts) by Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Bill Pickle.

The report mostly confirms what was reported previously: many files on the shared server were unprotected, so that anybody who knew how could get them; a clerk working for the Republican staff, under the direction of a senior Republican staffer, accessed more than 4,000 of the Democrats’ files; and some of the juiciest files were leaked to the press, probably by the aforementioned Republican staffer.

The report also contradicts some claims made previously. It is clear from the report that the availability of the files was not widely known. The report also shows that the people making the accesses worked to cover their tracks, both during and after the time when the accesses occurred. It also appears that the Republican staff member who oversaw the accesses made false statements to the investigators.

I wrote before that it wasn’t clear whether the accesses violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The key question in applying the CFAA to these facts was whether the staffers were “entitled to” access the particular files they downloaded; and the answer to that question depends on the rules and practices of the Senate.

The issue still isn’t clear-cut, but the facts recounted in the report tend to tip the balance toward violation of the CFAA. The accessors’ efforts to cover their tracks, both during and after the accesses, are revealing. And the report tells how the clerk, on initially discovering the files were accessible, took a pile of printed-out opposition files to one of his supervisors, who shredded the files and “admonished [the clerk] not to use the … documents”. These facts, plus the apparent false statements made to the investigators, tend to support the argument that the clerk and the staffer knew that the accesses were improper.

The report makes no recommendation for or against a referral of the CFAA matter to the Justice Department. That decision is in the hands of the Senators.

There seems to be an active rivalry between the authors of competing computer viruses, with back-and-forth insults included in the textual comments within each virus, according to a Mike Musgrove story in today’s Washington Post.

Witty repartee it’s not: “Bagle – you are a looser!!!” But one does worry about what will come next, if the loosers decide to escalate from a war of words to an e-war. If that happens, the next step will be new virus versions that try to inoculate victims’ machines against rival viruses. And don’t expect the kind of clean, surgical inoculation you get from a good antivirus product, but a crude rewiring of the victims’ software configuration, causing all sorts of trouble.

In the worst (but unlikely) case, this could escalate into a full-on game of distributed core wars, with rampaging malware armies clashing in the computers of people foolish enough to click on the wrong attachments.

Let’s hope this doesn’t happen. And let’s all remember to update our antivirus software and be very suspicious of email attachments.