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Why older tech is sometimes safer from hackers
- bell-cot 23d agoMS-DOS: Over 45 years, and STILL NO remote holes in the default install!
- dolmen 23d agoWell, there is no protection against compromised floppy disk sent by snail mail. I have also seen virus source code published in books and magazines. We don't have such threats anymore.
- KellyCriterion 23d ago-- virus source code published in books and magazines. We don't have such threats anymore. -- No, we do not need this anymore - today you have CAPTCHAs, convincing people to copy & paste PowerShell code on their machine and execute it with Admin privileges! :-D
- M95D 23d agoYes there is. Simply don't boot it or execute the virus. There is no autorun in MS-DOS, you know...
- M95D 23d agoI wonder if anyone looked for vulnerabilities in the TCP/IP stack or DOS redirector.
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- high_na_euv 23d ago>But the team picked an older software version for their honeypot that had been upgraded multiple times since its release and, consequently, no hackers bothered to target it. "When we upgraded it to the new one, we had all the attacks we wanted," recalls Bishop. "I thought it was so amusing." It feels like fantasy imo While I could understand using outdated or not popular protocols, then software with known vulns seems crazy when we are living in world of automated, ai assisted scanners
- bell-cot 23d agoLet's say your security budget is pretty limited, and you can say with relative certainly that there's only a 0.1% chance of any adversary bothering to check the known flaws in your FossileWare(tm) Firewall in a given month. Vs.how many dire flaws have been found in big-name security products in the past year, that even a low-budget adversary is likely to be regularly checking for?
- fhdkweig 23d agoThere is no human making a decision on what attacks to run. They check for literally everything. 20 years ago, I ran a web server and would run 'tail -f' on the access logs. I watched the bots sending requests for files that only exist on linux, then send requests for files that only exist on windows. They don't know what kind of system they are hacking. They just know that there is a computer at that IP address. There are databases that list every known flaw in existence, and the bots just go down the list checking each and every one. And if it doesn't work, in 5 minutes, they'll run those same tests again as if something changed in those 5 minutes.
- pixl97 23d agoYep, this kind of stuff is easily automated these days and bots don't get bored.
- skinfaxi 23d ago> a 0.1% chance of any adversary bothering to check the known flaws in your FossileWare(tm) Firewall in a given month. How would you arrive at this percentage in your risk analysis?
- bell-cot 23d agoIf you're getting scanned, keep logs, and have a decent way to tag log entries with the associated vuln, then you can start building statistical models of how exploit attempt probabilities fade as the target software gets older and lower market share. No, the 0.1% won't be exact. Yes, such data and models can be shared. Paying $$$ for a LatestGreatest(tm) Firewall won't make you 100% secure either. And the $$$ might better be spent on an extra layer of swiss cheese, or better recovery capability.
- jerf 23d agoMakes it harder to catch you in a general sweep, but it probably makes it much easier if anyone decides to target you specifically. How good a tradeoff that is varies from person to person. And the difficulty of targeting a specific person is changing in an AI world. I wouldn't try to characterize it any farther than that, just to observe that it is changing. "Hey AI go individually research and target county clerks for getting direct access to their {specific system}" is much more practical today than it was 10 years ago, and will be even more so 10 years from now.
- GuB-42 23d agoIt reminds me of an interview with police detectives. They say that some criminals think that using weapons like swords and bows will make the police job harder because police is so used to deal with guns that they may have a blind spot. The thing is: police actually have data on swords and bows, and the fact it is so unusual to commit crimes with these limit the search space and tend to make the investigation easier.
- postexitus 23d agoI understand BBC may not have the technical background to critically assess this approach, but whoever using Eudora (I loved it in 2001 btw) for security should get their credentials removed via King's order. Security through "obsolescence" is no different from security through obscurity - therefore, it doesn't work. Somebody not bothering to look for holes in your software doesn't mean they don't exist - in the age of Claude - I am pretty sure I can destroy your legacy software in minutes.
- alephnerd 23d ago> I understand BBC may not have the technical background... This is BBC Future - the BBC's tech clickbait publisher - not BBC News. BBC consists of the non-profit news bureau as well as at least a dozen for-profit clickbait and listicle publishers. BBC's ad-free mandate is only for the UK. > in the age of Claude - I am pretty sure I can destroy your legacy software in minutes Yep. One of our PortCos has unrestricted access to Anthropic and GPT models. With whitebox testing, it's trivial to identify vulns in legacy environments. With blackbox testing, it takes some effort but it doable with the right steering.
- trashb 23d agowait until you find out that a large percentage of operating system developers use mutt, alpine or mail.
- postexitus 23d agomutt is still being actively developed. Being on command line doesn't make something legacy. Eudora on the other hand had its latest version out 2 decades ago - it lacks even the most basic security updates (starting from TLS, but many more).
- JacobKfromIRC 23d agoI would be curious to know what kind of vulnerabilities the latest version of Eudora (7.1.0.9 I think) has. With how old it is (2006), surely there are several critical vulnerabilities, but all I could find when looking online is that an IMAP server or SMTP server can execute arbitrary code, which doesn't seem likely to cause a real problem, because I wouldn't expect Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. to use this trick. The article links to a vulnerability from 1998, which I expect is already fixed in the versions of Eudora people still use. I agree it would probably be easy for AI to find exploitable bugs though.
- torginus 23d agoIt's incredible how far back the surveillance state goes - GSM mobile phones have an IMEI number that's tied to the handset - and the SIM is tied to the subscriber, and your phone broadcasts imei to neighboring towers constantly. I haven't really gotten really into this, but from what I can tell, anything that has to do with mobile phones is strictly worse in terms of anonimity than Wifi. At least anything that ties a Wifi connection to you you can change in an OS setting, but if you get into faking IMEI/SIM stuff, that can very quickly get you charged with an actual crime.
- rkozik1989 23d agoOne of the things about mobile phone is that there's 2 OSes on the phone: one that handles the phone stuff and the other that you as a user actually interact with. What's really scary about it is that the OS we do not think about is often licensed to the manufacturer (Apple, Samsung, etc.), closed-source, and dated. There's a lot of security firms that sell fake cell towers to law enforcement and governments and that gives them access to all of the data you send over the network. In older formats like 2G there was no encryption on anything sent over the wire. If you dig into the fake cell tower rabbit hole you'll find what you're talking about to be an even worse problem.
- __MatrixMan__ 23d agoI think this how modern CPUs work also.
- rithdmc 23d agoAnything billed by the second has good (-enough) cost attribution built in.
- pudgywalsh 23d ago> surveillance state How do you suppose mobile phones are meant to work without subscriber info? > I haven't really gotten really into this Clearly.
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- chrisvls 23d agoSadly, the real lesson we need to learn from Battlestar Galactica is not this. They weren't saved by old software, they were saved by not having critical systems on the network unnecessarily. Our water and power utilities need to re-watch the pilot.
- fhdkweig 23d agoTo be fair, it was both. Those ships that got the recent upgrades also got trojans that Caprica Six put in the defense mainframe with Baltar's access codes.
- flowerlad 23d agoWhy are our water and power utilities connected to the internet? Is it so that the employees controlling them can work from home? If so they are accepting too much risk relative to the benefit.
- rossng 23d ago> Interest in magnetic tape is only increasing further today because the cost of random access memory (Ram), a form of computer memory that doesn't rely on tape, is skyrocketing. hmm
- lukan 23d agoSign of quality journalism? LLM's probably would not have made such a misstake ..
- chasil 23d agoHere is a good example where this is not so. Unfortunately, my datacenter runs this vulnerable VMS release on an emulated VAX. https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2018/02/06/ghost-in-the-dcl-shell-openvms-touted-as-ultra-reliable-had-a-local-root-hole-for-30-years/404720 https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2018/02/06/ghost-in-the-...
- thataccount 23d agoMoney defines the targets, and usually people running old software are thought not to have money. It is a zero sum game that shifts with the technology and ends when technology no longer is the theater where people can make or steal money.
- pixl97 23d agoEh not really true at all with my experience. 100 million dollar industries commonly have old crap running for years that becomes nearly untouchable as staff rotates and everyone gets afraid to touch it.
- hanneshdc 23d agoThis is terrible advice and I feel like this article will be used by managers of outdated IT systems to defend not upgrading their tech stack. There are hospitals out there still running on windows XP. Someone's going to skim this article and say "look, we're actually being prudent"!
- danielvaughn 23d agoI know someone who works at a data center for the IRS, and a lot of their records are all stored in PDFs. He thought it was disgusting when he first learned about it, but eventually realized that it's essentially resistant to a large scale data leak. Retrieval just isn't fast enough.
- Zambyte 23d agoHow is it resistant? Can't all the pdfs just be leaked?
- GolfPopper 23d agoPresumably the pdfs are so large that moving any significant chunk of them over available bandwidth takes so much time, and requires so much storage, that doing so just isn't useful for the attacker. While I don't know any of the relevant numbers involved, imagine a scenario where exfiltrating even 10% of the total data would take years. What would be the point? A malicious actor can target individual records, but leaking a lot of them becomes impractical.
- lesuorac 23d agoRight, the entire PDF. You can't just create a tiny csv of the records you want. You need to upload GBs of data which is easily noticed by any of the routers involved. Although I mean just because somebody noticed data is being leaked they might not have the authority to stop that doge employee or whomever.
- hypfer 23d agoDaily reminder that connecting everything to the cloud was a terrible idea and should never have happened like it did.
- __MatrixMan__ 23d agoThis seems largely to be about security by obscurity. I was hoping it was gonna be about how our modern practices are making things less secure. For instance, we claim we need to be able to rapidly update clients so that we can patch security vulnerabilities as they are discovered (often without involving the user at all). And there are a lot of companies that have an incentive to push this narrative because they have products which facilitate this whack-a-mole approach to security. But there's no reason to believe that new software is more secure than old software. Old software is just more likely to be known to be insecure. So anything written before it became trendy to update without your user's consent is more secure in at least one way because it is not configured to automatically update to whatever comes down the pipe from "the vendor".
- initramfs 23d agoRight, the sub-headline "security through antiquity" is a nod to both the oft-repeated "security through obscurity," while pointing out the fact that antiquity is sometimes underutilized or undervalued as a security mechanism (even if not tamperproof). Cyber defenses are thus best multi-pronged, which offers the best protection- by maximizing the amount of time an intruder would need to spend to determine what system it is using. About your second comment- newer systems CAN be less secure, but not always. But even if they are, falling back on things like eLoran are important.
- __MatrixMan__ 23d agoSure, it can go either way, and so which version to use is a decision to be made by the user, not on their behalf by a vendor. Consider the CrowdStrike debacle. It wouldn't have been a big deal if they could just boot to yesterday's config because today's config is broken, but neither vendor involved trusts their users enough for that kind of thing, which turned it into a disaster.
- initramfs 23d agoForgot about that. I intially thought you were referring to CloudFlare Captcha's, which Google and Firefox are partnering with: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/318891/20260623/cloudflare-chrome-firefox-plan-replace-captchas-cryptographic-tokens.htm https://www.techtimes.com/articles/318891/20260623/cloudflar... It's remarkable how much more time one has to wait just to access the same level of information (Cookie Policy, EULAs, etc). Even with "lighter" weight HTTP Firewall utilities such as Anubis (https://github.com/techaroHQ/anubis https://github.com/techaroHQ/anubis), the average user has to pay for other's (DDoSers) misdeeds. Now no one can visit a site without a firewall unless it's static and rate-limited by IP address to avoid crashing a small home server. Some impressive LMDBs might be able to serve up to 100,000 requests per second on a lightweight PC, but then again they could still be knocked offline from a super resourceful organization. I like not putting all my eggs in one basket. A similar bug could happen with something like Cloudflare- the computer serving up the firewall could have a bug, and it's not programmed to fall back on serving the site without the gatekeeping. If the site is prominent enough, it might routinely face DoS attacks which prevents it from being used. But if it's an uneventful day, it could still manage a lower-tech firewall and still be functional.
- Havoc 23d agoThe Irish example seems good. Keeping the old tech in parallel rather than replacing
- sobkas 23d agoThings that are plenty and cheap to replace are easy to hack because if you broke them, you could always try again...
- IAmBroom 23d agoBox cutters? Plentiful, cheap, impossible to "hack". Nuclear centrifuge software? Rare, expensive, hacked.
- thedanbob 23d agoReminds me of a sci-fi book I read where the protagonist goes to hack a computer but can't because it's running a 50 year old alien OS that none of his tools will run on. That said, as a strategy it will only protect you from bots going after low-hanging fruit, not someone targeting you specifically.
- kodoman 23d agoI am one of those emacs users who use it for everything, it always worries me the way that it could be attacked given (particularly email some how evaling some elisp or something), Despite how easy emacs would be to exploit in many aspects I do not know of any attack done on emacs either through supply chain attack (think about how many third party libs an emacs mode might use) or one of the many ways that it's no doubt possible to get emacs to eval something the user would not want it to do. If anyone knows why or if their has been an attack on emacs I would love to know.
- a_e_k 23d agoSee "The Cuckoo's Egg" [1] by Cliff Stoll (who sometimes posts here [2]). A few related HN threads: [3] [4] [5]. The book describes tracking down a hacker in 1986 who exploited a vulnerability in early Emacs' movemail utility. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CliffStoll https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CliffStoll [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21830277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21830277 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39843930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39843930 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49406713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49406713
- kodoman 23d agoVery nice thank you!
- hn_submit 23d agoAnother reason is that a lot of tech from 20 years ago uses the QNX microkernel operating system, which is highly secure even when the software is never patched. The problem is that most of these older devices are about to be replaced and many manufacturers have switched to Linux for their operating system. It's cheaper and requires no licensing, but far more insecure. It needs almost constant patching to stay secure because the attack surface is so large.
- VCFundedGenYer 23d agoThere is definitely a trough of vulnerability for older machines. For Windows 3.1/95/98 I feel they were incredibly vulnerable in the 2000s and 2010s, but now they have aged so much where getting to them is becoming a hurdle and a chore preventing attackers from making it to the target.
- mikewarot 23d ago>The Irish Aviation Authority, for instance, recently decided to keep ground-based radio navigation beacons in use because supposedly the more modern satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) has proven so susceptible to jamming in recent years. Back when my friend Jim (retired Pilot) and I visited Chicago's Approach Control facility, I asked one question "What would happen if GPS went away?", they didn't like the question one bit. It's really not good the way we're getting rid of ground based navigation aids in the US.
- rbanffy 23d agoThe whole “they won’t hack me because they won’t bother to target Eudora running on AIX 3.1” is flawed in an age when AI is both ubiquitous and cheap. It wasn’t worth targeting you because it required the attention of a human, but now it requires just a few seconds of a GPU server that’s running on stolen credentials. This is the thing with AI - it has an infinite capacity to do things - the same way we find new RCEs by the dozen so we can fix them, our attackers find them so they can get infiltrate our systems.