Nt1310 Unit 3 Summary

UNIX system uses the password file to store the encrypted passwords. It is even hard for the system administrator to find out about the passwords as the password file is filled with encrypted gibberish. And there is no way to reconstruct them. However, the intruder found a valid account in Clifford’s UNIX system and was able to login onto the system by using the guess password in three attempts. This also explained the fact why the intruder copied password files from each system that he has broken into. It seems like that the intruder encrypted every word in the English Language by running his password encryption program. Eventually, his program would collect all the passwords in a dictionary which were then used to crack into UNIX system.

Users can open any unknown file as text file using software like MadEdit. And then can collect and save some pieces of information which can be used to answer the question of what the unknown file is. The fact that the every little detail in catching intruders is important was attested when Dave pointed out that the intruder was using AT&T UNIX because of the difference in an UNIX commands used by the intruder (“f” flag used by the intruder to list each process's files where as in Berkeley’s UNIX does this automatically) which helped Stoll to narrowed down the location of the intruder to the East Coast. The intruder set up “Kermit” to transfer as short program which function similar to Trojan horses to steal account name and passwords by prompting a message for user to enter the account names and password twice while attempting to log in the system. Stoll was astounded that the hacker could easily guess the passwords easily on many of these high-security sites, because many system administrators never bothered to change the passwords from their factory