The background: it is traditional, at the faculty-hosted "Gala Dinner" of the Institute for Applied Network Security Forum, for the faculty to be the entertainment. It is also traditional for faculty-member Marcus Ranum to come up with the assignment. In the past, we've had to come up with our (individual) favorite pet-peeve or rant in the area of computer and network security. (See a column based on mine at www.ianetsec.com/news/all_fc_avolio1.htm or this blog entry.)

At the recent Mid-Atlantic Network Security Forum the assignment was to come up with a haiku (at least structurally) based on a real network security story.

First the abbreviated story:

Not liking to make fun of current clients, this is something that happened back in 1993. My team and I were connecting a high-profile government site onto the Internet for, they believed, the first time. We were goign to install a firewall that we built special for the occassion. We suggested a review of the existing physical network to make sure we and they knew to where they were already connected. The review turned up an already-existing connection to the Internet through another organization. In fact, at the time this other organization was well-known for getting broken into.

The haiku: