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Date:      Fri, 27 Jul 2001 20:25:27 +0300
From:      Peter Pentchev <roam@orbitel.bg>
To:        Jon Loeliger <jdl@jdl.com>
Cc:        "Antoine Beaupre (LMC)" <Antoine.Beaupre@ericsson.ca>, security@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Some Followup on that ypchfn mess of mine
Message-ID:  <20010727202527.E1105@ringworld.oblivion.bg>
In-Reply-To: <200107271716.MAA15378@chrome.jdl.com>; from jdl@jdl.com on Fri, Jul 27, 2001 at 12:16:16PM -0500
References:  <3B616ED0.8050808@lmc.ericsson.se> <200107271716.MAA15378@chrome.jdl.com>

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On Fri, Jul 27, 2001 at 12:16:16PM -0500, Jon Loeliger wrote:
> So, like "Antoine Beaupre (LMC)" was saying to me just the other day:
> > Hi.
> > 
> > Sorry to be a pain, but you really should kill this machine. Just backup 
> > your data, format the drive and reinstall from trusted source.
> > 
> > You can't just keep playing around this box and expect to fix 
> > everything. Unless you already had some IDS such as tripwire, it's 
> > almost impossible.
> > 
> > Reinstall. It's for your own good. :)
> > 
> > A.
> 
> OK, I'll state it publicly:
> 
>     This machine will be rebuilt from sources.
>     The old disk will be completely reformatted.
>     I'm putting a new firewall in place first.

Sorry to be a pain ;)  But sometimes, a rebuild from sources might
not be enough: you'll have to perform at least the install on
the machine in question (unless you take off the hard disk, mount
it on another machine, build from sources, and install with a DESTDIR
pointing to this machine's filesystems).  This still poses a risk,
albeit unlikely, of somebody having compromised your compiler, make(1),
install(1), perl, and whatever else is running on the machine before
the installation starts using the newly-compiled binaries.

This is why I - following the advice of others, including
http://www.FreeBSD.org/security/ - recommended backing up the data,
then reinstalling from a CD (or over the net; the point is, reinstalling
from a install medium completely unrelated to the compromised machine).

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Do you think anybody has ever had *precisely this thought* before?

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