From: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com>
Date: Sun, 27 Apr 1997 17:07:36 -0700 (PDT)
To: alan@ctrl-alt-del.com
Subject: Re: Staale & Elm
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19970427144534.02beb820@mail.teleport.com>
Message-ID: <199704280005.RAA18503@slack.lne.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Alan Olsen writes:
> At 10:46 AM 4/27/97 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> >At 04:29 PM 4/26/97 -0500, harka@nycmetro.com wrote:
> >>1. Does anybody know, what happened to the International
> >>PGP-Homepage (http//www.ifi.uio.no/PGP/)?
> >>It comes up as "Link not found" (?!)
> >>Also Staales personal page (http://www.ifi.uio.no/~staalesc/) seems
> >>to be gone...
> >
> >It's there now.... must have been a glitch.
> 
> I have been noticing a problem contacting sites all over Northern and Central
> Europe.
> 
> I mirror selected crypto sites on a local system (for personal use, not
> general distribution or FTP) and have noticed that I cannot get a reliable
> mirror off of a couple of different sites.  sable.ox.ac.uk, hacktic.nl,
> win.tue.nl and ftp.orpht.lu have all been unreliable/unreachable the last few
> days.  I am not certain if this is a bandwidth issue or if someone is activly
> interfearing with sites dealing in Unix Security/Crypto software.
> (ftp.funet.fi has been tempermental, but reachable.  Sites in other areas
> have been unaffected.)
> 
> Anyone have more data on this?


Yea, it's a problem with a Sprint customer who put out a bunch of
bogus routes.  Since friday I have been having problems connecting
to various sites, not all of them security-related.

According to an article in the Mercury News (info from more technically
knowledgable sources welcome):

  A problem at an Internet service provider in Virginia
  triggered a massive logjam on the Internet Friday, but
  the trouble was cleared up later in the day, Sprint
  Corp. said. A customer of MAI Network Services, a
  McLean, Va.-based Internet provider that is among
  900 companies that buy wholesale access to the Net
  from Sprint, entered 10,000 duplicate routes to the
  Internet backbone.   That caused massive access delays for
  an undetermined number of users, a Sprint spokes
  man said. 


I wonder how long it'll be possible for unauthenticated/unapproved people to
mess around with routers.  Eventually the net will become so important
(because so much business involves it) that a large outage will cost
a lot of important people money.  They'll demand that politicians
"do something" to fix it.  It's a safe bet that instead of
doing what hackers/software engineers/IETF members would do
to solve the problem, namely re-designing things so that a single error
can't bring down the whole net, they'll just pass a law requiring
that anyone who wants the 'enable' password to a cisco have first
passed a government-approved "Internet Administrators Class" and
gotten a license.


-- 
   Eric Murray  ericm@lne.com         Privacy through technology!
  Network security and encryption consulting.    PGP keyid:E03F65E5