CA-90:11
			    CERT Advisory
			  December 10, 1990
		      Security probes from Italy
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Many sites on the Internet received messages from
"miners@ghost.unimi.it" (131.175.10.64) on Sunday, December 9.  The
messages stated that "miners" is a group of researchers and students
in the computer science department at the state university of Milano
in Italy; a group testing for a "common bug" in network hosts.  In 
addition to the messages, a number of sites detected probes
from the unimi.it domain.  Later today, a number of individuals
received a follow up message from "postmaster@ghost.unimi.it"
explaining the activities.

We have received reports that this activity has now stopped, and an
unofficial explanation has been provided by several administrators at
the University of Milano.  The rest of this message describes the
sequence of events and the security holes that were probed.

Following the original messages from miners@ghost and
postmaster@ghost, another message was sent on the afternoon of December
10th from several administrators at the University of Milano.  They
stated that the authorities at the University had been informed and
that the attempts had stopped.  They also noted that they had not been
informed of the tests in advance.

The administrators at the University of Milano have sent us a copy of
the scripts that were used to probe the Internet sites.  These scripts
checked for the existence of the sendmail WIZ and DEBUG commands,
and attempted to get /etc/motd and/or /etc/passwd via TFTP and
by exploiting an old vulnerability in anonymous FTP.  The scripts
also attempted to rsh to a site and try to cat /etc/passwd.  Finally,
the scripts mailed to root at each site they tested with the message
from "miners@ghost.unimi.it".

The administrators at the University of Milano state that the group
that did this was doing this to discover which (if any) sites might
have had these security flaws, and then to let the sites know about
these vulnerabilities.  They have stated that they still intend to
inform sites that have these vulnerabilities.

To our knowledge, no site was actually broken into (as of December 10,
1990).  Nonetheless, the CERT does not condone this type of activity.

Most of the information in this advisory is based on information given
to us via e-mail from individuals at the University of Milano.  We
have not yet been able to check this information with any officials at
the University; if we learn of any other significant information, we will
update this advisory.

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Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT)
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890

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Telephone: 412-268-7090 24-hour hotline:
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