The serious security problem that was reported in Risks Volume 8, Issue 15 has been corrected by Sun. Sun support and Sun's field offices are now able to supply a new set of programs that will solve the problem. Until you receive the new programs from Sun, we suggest that you change the protection of the login program. This will allow login to continue to work but removes users access to it. Since we do not have a Sun 386i system at CERT, we were unable to test the new programs being supplied by Sun.
Field reports indicate that the new programs do solve the problem.
When using floppies, the user is generally led to beleive that nothing can happen to alter a floppy that lacks the notch giving permission to write. In actual fact, this is not the case. I had always thought the problem was unique to the Apple. This write protection is performed in software at some level.