On Wednesday, the 14,300-strong subscribers to a popular security list known as Vuln-Dev received what may have appeared a rare treat: a message to the list containing source code to a program that gave the user full control of a remote Unix system. But as some Vuln-Dev readers, many of whom are system administrators for businesses, painfully learned, the program was a Trojan horse, and if compiled and run, could delete most of the files on the user's computer.. . .
On Wednesday, the 14,300-strong subscribers to a popular security list known as Vuln-Dev received what may have appeared a rare treat: a message to the list containing source code to a program that gave the user full control of a remote Unix system. But as some Vuln-Dev readers, many of whom are system administrators for businesses, painfully learned, the program was a Trojan horse, and if compiled and run, could delete most of the files on the user's computer.

List member Jason Parker told Newsbytes he glanced over the code before compiling it, decided it looked legitimate, and ran it Thursday on the test account of a system.

"I lost everything in the home directory, including information I would rather not have lost, but that's the price you pay for trusting," said Parker, who has since replaced the front page of his site with an obscene comment about Meinel.

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