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**** The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ****
**** Computation Center ****
*** 10-April-1995 ***
On Thursday's afternoon all communication systems of the Hebrew university
were disconnected after detecting illegal actions; this was done in order to
protect the systems from further damage.
It was found that few systems were breaked in. After overall checks we
believe that most systems, including this one, has not been breached.
However, as a precaution all users are forced to replace their passwords.
If you access the system only for Email via a PC client (like Eudora),
please login interactively and change your password.
Currently most departments are disconnected from the network; they are
being reconnected after doing basic checks about the security of the
their networks.
We would like to repeat here various security things which were mentioned
in few different places over the years:
1. The Internet is not a secure network and is subject for "listenning"
by other users. At the university the terminal servers network is
regarded at the more secure network. The other networks at the
buildings, to which PC's and workstations are connected are regarded
as "unsecure" and thus are separate from the terminal servers network.
By "unsecure" we mean that there is no way to check whether someone
is listenning on that network or not.
2. Your first and almost only deffence line against break-in is your
password. Hence, the password is personal, should not be easily guessed
and should not be given to anyone else. This prevents from someone
else breaking into your own account, unless he is listenning on the wire.
Soon we'll support one-time password devices which are effective against
gaining access to your account even when someone is listenning to your
network. Please contact us if you need more details.
3. What happens if someone's else account has been breaked in? Well, it
depends how you protect your files from other users. The intruder has
the same permissions as every normal user, thus he/she can access your
files which were granted access to others. the default protection is
to deny access to all others; if you did not change it, then you have
almost nothing to worry from other users.
We'll check in the future ways to encrypt files in order to
enhance the security.
4. Email: Due to the old design of the Email protocol over the Internet
it is easily possible to forge Email messages. Hence, do not blindly
trust any mail item you receive.
__Yehavi:
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