Re: Where is Tom?

"Luc The Perverse" <sll_noSpamlicious_z_XXX_m@cc.usu.edu> wrote in message
news:438d2ac6$0$3429$3a2ecee9@news.csolutions.net...
> Did he give up on us?

Now that we've had the requisite joke, I'll hazard a guess. The entire
position is based on a couple of things: 1) Never put to malice what can be
attributed to lethargy, 2) Tom's mysterious attacker seems to be missing in
action lately as well, 3) I never did check the source IP for those
messages. From this I am hypothesizing that what happened is Tom didn't
secure his mox very well (his webserver was rather well known, almost
certainly other ports were open as well), some unknown person hacked the box
turning it into a one computer zombie network (obviously for lack of
knowledge how to connect it to a larger one). Then making use of Tom's spare
cycles sent out all the messages from Tom's computer. Due to the quantity of
complaints and bandwidth usage, Tom's ISP turned him off. This would explain
why he's not online long enough to play around with sci.crypt, but can
update the LibTomCrypt website (last update 11/25/2005, last message I see
from him here 11/3/2005).

So basically, my theory is that he forgot to secure something on his system,
which could also explain why he was targetted instead of me (my system being
behind 2 different firewalls, a dynamic IP, NAT and VPN at all times).
                    Joe
Received on Sat Dec 3 04:20:31 2005