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IIS: Security, Schmecurity (3/15/00)
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Crack all the jokes you want about "military intelligence" being a contradiction in terms, but you have to admit that the U.S. Army made at least one smart move last year: they got sick and tired of watching their web site get hacked, so they finally dumped Windows NT and the nest of bugs known as the IIS web server and switched to Macs running WebSTAR. As you can imagine, that was a red letter day for Mac boosters everywhere; finally, the inherent security of the Mac OS was getting some real attention, and of course StarNine, the makers of WebSTAR, milked the whole Army thing for all it was worth. In the end, the Army got a secure web site, StarNine got to crow about signing the U.S. Army as a new customer, and the Mac community at large got another piece of informational ammunition against those bizarre IT types who blindly assume that Microsoft technologies are the only game in town. Everybody was happy.
Fast-forward six months to this morning, when we received word that the Army web site was again vandalized by hackers. Could it be? We've heard of WebSTAR sites being hacked before, but only when some third-party add-on compromised security in some way. We could just hear the sneering voices of those IT guys saying "we told you so." Nervously, we poked about through the new messages in the WebSTAR-Talk mailing list, when thankfully, we found the answer: neither of the two hacked Army sites was running WebSTAR like the main Army site was. Even less surprising, the ROTC server that was compromised is running-- all together, now-- Windows NT and IIS. Sigh. You'd think the whole U.S. Armed Forces would have learned their lesson by now, but noooooo...
The hacked site has long been pulled, but someone was kind enough to post a screenshot of the ROTC site taken when it was still, er, "altered"; what once was presumably some staid little ROTC blurb was transformed into a broken-English tirade dissing the Brazilian government. So what's the moral of the story, kiddies? Simple enough: rely on Microsoft's web server, and your site probably won't be as secure as it should be. And make no mistake-- there's a Brazilian out there with an anti-government agenda and a tenuous grasp of the English language just waiting to take advantage of that fact.
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SceneLink (2157)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 3/15/00 episode: March 15, 2000: Real Networks licenses Microsoft's Windows Media audio format, as Apple digs in for a long, tough battle to push QuickTime to the front. Meanwhile, another Army web site gets hacked; evidently not all Army sites switched to Macs. And early (sketchy) details surface about the post-Pismo PowerBook G4...
Other scenes from that episode: 2156: A Land War In Asia (3/15/00) When you're clawing away in a three-way battle, nothing's quite as disheartening as watching both your opponents join forces and engage you in a two-front war. Bummer for Apple, then, isn't it? After all, Apple's QuickTime has been duking it out in the streaming media space with competing technologies from Real Networks and Microsoft for quite a while now, so it's got to be a serious kick in the head to hear that Real has gone ahead and bought into some of Microsoft's streaming technology... 2158: The NEXT Next PowerBook (3/15/00) Admit it-- you were a little let down by Pismo, weren't you? Hey, it's nothing to be ashamed of; we'd all been hearing rumors about Apple's next PowerBook for so long, it's only natural to have been just a bit underwhelmed by what we got when it finally surfaced: a brand new PowerBook that looks just like last year's PowerBook...
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