The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : SATAN Should Deliver a Helluva Birthday

Dan Farmer, cyberspace’s favorite devil incarnate, is celebrating his birthday today.

At 7 a.m. this morning, the computer program that cost him his job, the one that brought down upon him the wrath of the computer security community and a firestorm of media attention in recent weeks, was set to be released for free on the Internet.

The program is called SATAN, short for Security Administrators Tool for Analyzing Networks. It lets anyone who has a copy of it scan for security holes in any computer system on the vast global computer network.

And despite threats and pleas from government, corporate and military system operators to distribute it to a limited, responsible group of law-abiding experts, Farmer and SATAN’s co-author, Wietse Venema, are making sure it’s darned easy to get ahold of.

Security experts themselves, Farmer--recently fired from Silicon Graphics Inc. over his plans to distribute SATAN--and Venema maintain that the only way to secure information stored on the Internet’s computers is to make a potent tool like SATAN widely available, and thus force people to tighten security.

Several computer security organizations, including the government-affiliated Computer Emergency Response Team, issued advisories this week warning of the program’s imminent release and outlining how to fix the holes it exposes.

Less serious Net denizens were trading “Top 10 Ways You Can Tell SATAN Has Invaded Your Network.” (Your monitor starts spinning around in circles, all keys except the ‘6’ suddenly disabled. Your router begins sending outgoing packets to hell.org.)

“If nothing else, after tomorrow, a lot of people will have taken a good look at their systems,” Farmer, still 32, said Tuesday. He plans to spend his doomsday, that is, birthday, far away from his computer.