... off-topic, but important, so I don't mind discussing that on this forum.
We (U. of Cologne) have been attacked by various means over the last months: - Someone abused an anonymous FTP server for swapping MP3 files. That was not harmful in itself, but used up bandwidth and caused "partition full" errors. It stopped when I replaced some MP3 files by symbolic links to /dev/zero and removed the writing permissions to the ftp directory. It seems that some people, or perhaps even robots, are scanning the Internet for free storage capacity. - We have *LOTS* of attempts to abuse our machines as mail relays. - Recently there are lots of e-mails with a cleverly concealed executable which overwrites the dialer information in modem-connected PCs with expensive telephone numbers. The executable is not really a worm or virus, but even so fairly widespread because the originators use automated scripts to generate thousands of e-mail accounts with wanadoo.fr, yahoo.com, gmx.de, etc., mail as much of their junk as possible, and close the account. Best regards, Ulrich Deiters
