musc@> $daniele.rant | Out-Blog

I was busy in the process of sorting out really old stuff I keep accumulated, and I found a very old, yellow piece of paper cut out of a newspaper in the very old time where in Italy we had no Internet available for home use, and BBS were our "communities". "The Net" was the telephone network, eventually with dial-in gateways to the public italian X.25 network: ITAPAC. At that time my NEW (and expensive) modem was a 2400baud which could also do 9600 with compression!
As far as I remember the event described in this article was the first real case of "hacking" being prosecuted in italy. It was January, 21st 1993.
I have scanned the article (sorry it's in Italian) and I posted it here.

The operation is also described in the following two papers:
http://www.aiea.it/pdf/documenti/banane.pdf
http://www.aiea.it/pdf/documenti/hunters.pdf

All of this made me think how the history evolved, and which the important events have been in the "hacking" or "security" scene, even at that time when that (security) was not a fashion like it is now.

After that event, we see, the year after, a massive seizing of devices, that someone has compared to "the hacker crackdown" happened in America in 1992.
Even a chapter of a book has ben published on the matter:
http://www.apogeonline.com/openpress/libri/529/capi4.html.

Those were really different times!

Be very glad that your PC is insecure – it means that after you buy it, you can break into it and install whatever software you want. What YOU want, not what Sony or Warner or AOL wants.
– John Gilmore

This comes out the newsletter of SANS:
It seems the final nail potentially has been placed into the coffin of Windows NT. Last week, Microsoft released security bulletin MS03-010, which details how anyone with access to port 135 can crash the RPC endmapper service, thereby taking down all RCP functionality and some COM functionality, too. According to Microsoft, the Windows NT architecture has proven unable to accommodate a fix; thus, Windows NT systems are just going to have to go on being vulnerable, indefinitely. This leaves a large threat to internal Windows NT systems, particularly older domain controllers and WINS servers that have not been migrated to Windows 2000 or later. Let's just hope the next big Internet worm that manages to slither into private networks doesn't tickle this vulnerability, since there's no way to defend against it.

In these days where we hear only about security of Windows and of Unix environment, I've written some considerations about the "resurrection" of Novell Netware as a viable alternative for an Internet Server. You can read it here.
There is also an Italian version published by ITVC here.

I would appreciate having feedback on that one. Just feel free to email mail about it.

On this site there used to be a listing of Vulnerabilities discovered and other security related informations. I removed it some time ago, because it took me too much time to keep it up-to-date.
This will mainly become a place where I will post my ideas about the security market, the world, and what passes through my brain.