Thursday, November 10, 2005

Riga Airport: we're skeptical but working on it

The head of IT at Riga's International Airport said he didn't believe that my source (let's call him WhiteHat) had actually gained even partial control of the airport's webserver. A preliminary inspection of logs didn't show any intrusions, leading the airport IT honcho (let's call him RIXSysadmin) to assert that the whole thing was either a) faked or b) very sophisticated, leaving no obvious traces. All I can say is that WhiteHat didn't strike me as, to use a charming expression from British English - a nutter. RIXSysadmin also appears to be taking the whole incident (see the earlier post) quite seriously and says that when a complete check is finished, there will be an official statement from the airport through its Press Secretary. That sounds good so far.
RIXSysdamin was also a bit peeved at the story being published in a certain paper and, perhaps, here as well. I pointed out that the real Merry Pranksters already probably know about any fun to be had on the airport's systems, as there are hacker sites, etc., where new, fun places are posted every day. I doubt that the typical reader of my newspaper or even of this blog will run off to crack the airport's intranet and print its fire drill scheme.
Meanwhile, WhiteHat wrote saying that he had e-mailed someone in RIXSysadmin's position about a year ago, warning of the vulnerability. Nothing happened. He says he may ask for permission to do some more probing and show that he can get pretty far into the airport network if he wanted to.
The story goes on...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

imho no mushjas uzpuusts zilonis shoreiz..