LinuxSecurity.com: If It Ain’t Broke See If It’s Fixed

“‘He got into the UUCP account. No password protection. Wide
open. …Worse, Elxsi had its UUCP account set up with system
privileges, It took the hacker only a minute to realize that he’d
stumbled into a privileged account. …He didn’t lose any time. He
edited the password file, and added a new account, one with system
manager privileges. Named it Mark. ‘Keep it bland,” I
thought.”

That is an excerpt from the book Cuckoo’s Egg published in 1989.
As far as the principles of how the attacker gained access to the
system above, nothing much has changed since that time. Attackers
are still exploiting the most well-known vulnerabilities in
computer systems. ‘This can be attributed to the fact that
attackers are opportunistic, take the easiest and most convenient
route, and exploit the best-known flaws with the most effective and
widely available attack tools.'(www.sans.org)

“This article is nothing new but it has to be reinforced every
now and then…”

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