"At the time the Sendmail program had a very poor reputation with respect to security, with four root vulnerabilities per year for two successive years"
- Wietse Venema
About this Quote
This quote by Wietse Venema is describing the Sendmail program, which is a mail transfer representative utilized to route e-mails. At the time of the quote, the Sendmail program had a very poor track record when it concerned security. This was because of the fact that there were four root vulnerabilities annually for two successive years. Root vulnerabilities are a kind of security vulnerability that can be made use of to gain access to the root user account, which is the most effective user account on a computer system. This suggests that anyone who had the ability to exploit these vulnerabilities would have complete access to the system, enabling them to do whatever they desired. This is why the Sendmail program had such a poor credibility with regard to security, as it was vulnerable to these types of attacks.
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