At this summer's Def Con - an annual tribal rite for the computer underground - the merry hackers of The Cult of the Dead Cow distributed copies of Back Orifice for Windows, a tool they described as "the killer app for Microsoft insecurity." Designed to illustrate security holes, the program exploits weaknesses in Windows systems to give remote users complete and undetectable control over any PC on a network.
Snoops can view or delete files or log keystrokes. Of course, Back Orifice users have to install the tiny 120K program on the target computer first - by hiding it as a Trojan horse, for instance. As lead programmer Sir Dystic (reclining, back row) says, "This is a worst-case scenario of what happens when an OS doesn't limit what a program can do."
ELECTRIC WORD
