It seems that even the experts get fooled sometimes. A Trojan horse posing as a security tool did just that Wednesday night, when experts at SecurityFocus.com-which moderates the popular Bugtraq security list-sent the mildly malicious code to the list's 37,000 users. . . .
It seems that even the experts get fooled sometimes. A Trojan horse posing as a security tool did just that Wednesday night, when experts at SecurityFocus.com-which moderates the popular Bugtraq security list-sent the mildly malicious code to the list's 37,000 users. "It seemed like legitimate code," said Elias Levy, chief technology officer for SecurityFocus. "It was given to us late last night. We sent a copy to (security software maker) Network Associates, and they said it looked OK."

The code posed as a so-called exploit, a program that identifies security flaws in a computer system. In this case, the exploit related to four flaws recently discovered in the common domain-name-service software known as the Berkeley Internet Name Domain, or BIND.

In reality, the exploit code attempts to use any computer on which it runs to send a simple form of Internet data to a single domain name server, in an attempt to overwhelm the computer with information. That server, it turns out, belongs to the company that found many of the BIND flaws: Network Associates.