Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: username who wrote (30020)	1/11/1998 5:41:00 PM
From: Jeff Jordan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

4. Do you think there is, or will be tomorrow at 9:30 am, a serious problem? If your talking about this Bonk/teardrop thing I'm not worried about someone putting it in my brokerage system.... I can always use the telephone. Besides this thing is not a virus and can be corrected easily I guess. It also brings to light the need for Ascends firewall security products....or I assume this stuff protects you. I do not think these people are terrorists? If they were I'm glad I closed my AOL account. But it has problems enough keeping you connected w/o something like Bonk/Boink. I think I'll buy some AOL puts now...its too high anyway. If you think the market has a serious problem...well, If say INTC dissapoints on Tuesday , look out....The fear has basically been all these poor earnings reports. So, the Asian flu, puts the jitters in everyone...IMHO the fear has been overdone thus far. But I agree w/ the sentiment in my earlier post and Cousin Bob's take on it. Jeff

To: username who wrote (30020)	1/11/1998 9:55:00 PM
From: Marc Hyman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

I have no way to judge the significance of this "hacker" invasion *OT* It is not an invasion. If what I've read here is true it is what is called a denial of service (DOS) attack. Yes, it is against the law. However, unless caught in the act it is unlikely that culprits will be caught. Partly because there are potentially thousands of culprits. All it takes is a mental midget to finds a program that will crash a remote site who then shares that info with his/her like minded friends who then try to find as many sites as possible that they can crash. It becomes a game. Now the attackers are wrong/bad/evil. But do NOT forget what allowed the attack to work in the first place -- a software bug. Yep. The attackers found out that if you created a packet with a certain type of error in it the operating system will do the wrong thing. Firewalls will often not protect against this type of DOS attack. How is the fire wall to know that a particular packet will trigger a bug in the server's software? The Microsoft OS's are relatively new. Being new they tend to have more holes -- perhaps only because the other OS vendors have already found and fixed holes that are now just being found in Windows and NT. Personally, I do NOT believe that NT is ready for 'mission critical' applications yet. Obviously, others disagree. // marc