Sadly, 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.
To 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.
Adding a layer of obscurity on top of your non-obscure security is a good idea. The more slices of swiss cheese you wrap your system with, the smaller the odds of the holes aligning.
Why 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.
From a efficiency perspective centralized anything seems better at first glance, however decentralized anything just seems more resilient in the long run like nature and/or our universe.
> the real lesson we need to learn from Battlestar Galactica
It's the same lesson that we can learn from Star Trek, Star Wars, and all the other self-aggrandising lore that humanity concocts when gazing lovingly in the mirror.
There is no greater enemy than greedy, barbaric humanity itself.
Makes 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.
It 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.
It'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.
One 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.
Doesn't the whole SIM architecture exist so that phones don't have to be trusted? I believe IMEI can be anything in practice, so long that there isn't a blatant duplicate nearby, a bit like Ethernet MAC address. I don't know if it's legal but phone nerds seem to be editing IMEI all the time for non-Apple phones as well, using those leaked vendor tools.
This 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".
Right, 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.
> 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.
I 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.
> in the age of Claude - I am pretty sure I can destroy your legacy software in minutes.
Yes but you'd need to a) know that they use that particular software and b) have a reason to bother destroying it in the first place.
That is really the crux of the idea.
The client the guy in the article uses isn't secure because it has no security vulnerabilities - it is secure because nobody bothers to target Eudora users in general.
Of course as others mentioned, if the target switches from "Eudora users in general" to "that guy in particular" then the situation changes (though the attackers would still need to realize he uses Eudora - assuming this article didn't exist to reveal it anyway :-P).
But aside from that, even "in the age of Claude", i doubt anyone is wasting time and/or tokens scanning the open Internet for all sorts of old vulnerabilities in antique software that (relatively) nobody uses in hopes they catch some random passer-by as there is barely any ROI by doing that compared to taking advantage of vulnerabilities on software that people actually use.
I 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.
> 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.
>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
Let'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?
I 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.
See "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.
The 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.
>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.
Reminds 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.
There 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.
Money 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.
Eh 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.
Another 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.
I 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.
Presumably 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.
Sadly, 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.
To 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.
Adding a layer of obscurity on top of your non-obscure security is a good idea. The more slices of swiss cheese you wrap your system with, the smaller the odds of the holes aligning.
[flagged]
Why 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.
"They weren't saved by old software, they were saved by not having critical systems on the network unnecessarily."
"Modern" software unnecessarily includes and routinely unnecessarily forces network connectivity
Perhaps they were saved by an old mindset
Doing some reading over at textfiles.com can reveal how cautious people were in the 1990's about connecting to the internet
The point is NOT older, rather decentralized!
From a efficiency perspective centralized anything seems better at first glance, however decentralized anything just seems more resilient in the long run like nature and/or our universe.
> the real lesson we need to learn from Battlestar Galactica
It's the same lesson that we can learn from Star Trek, Star Wars, and all the other self-aggrandising lore that humanity concocts when gazing lovingly in the mirror.
There is no greater enemy than greedy, barbaric humanity itself.
Makes 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.
It 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.
It'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.
One 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.
Doesn't the whole SIM architecture exist so that phones don't have to be trusted? I believe IMEI can be anything in practice, so long that there isn't a blatant duplicate nearby, a bit like Ethernet MAC address. I don't know if it's legal but phone nerds seem to be editing IMEI all the time for non-Apple phones as well, using those leaked vendor tools.
> surveillance state
How do you suppose mobile phones are meant to work without subscriber info?
> I haven't really gotten really into this
Clearly.
Anything billed by the second has good (-enough) cost attribution built in.
This 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".
Right, 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.
> 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
Sign of quality journalism? LLM's probably would not have made such a misstake ..
I 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.
> in the age of Claude - I am pretty sure I can destroy your legacy software in minutes.
Yes but you'd need to a) know that they use that particular software and b) have a reason to bother destroying it in the first place.
That is really the crux of the idea.
The client the guy in the article uses isn't secure because it has no security vulnerabilities - it is secure because nobody bothers to target Eudora users in general.
Of course as others mentioned, if the target switches from "Eudora users in general" to "that guy in particular" then the situation changes (though the attackers would still need to realize he uses Eudora - assuming this article didn't exist to reveal it anyway :-P).
But aside from that, even "in the age of Claude", i doubt anyone is wasting time and/or tokens scanning the open Internet for all sorts of old vulnerabilities in antique software that (relatively) nobody uses in hopes they catch some random passer-by as there is barely any ROI by doing that compared to taking advantage of vulnerabilities on software that people actually use.
I 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.
> 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.
wait until you find out that a large percentage of operating system developers use mutt, alpine or mail.
>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
Let'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?
I 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.
See "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)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CliffStoll
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21830277
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39843930
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49406713
The 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.
>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.
MS-DOS: Over 45 years, and STILL NO remote holes in the default install!
Well, 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.
I wonder if anyone looked for vulnerabilities in the TCP/IP stack or DOS redirector.
Here 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-...
Reminds 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.
There 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.
Money 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.
Eh 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.
The Irish example seems good. Keeping the old tech in parallel rather than replacing
Another 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.
This 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"!
Things that are plenty and cheap to replace are easy to hack because if you broke them, you could always try again...
Box cutters? Plentiful, cheap, impossible to "hack".
Nuclear centrifuge software? Rare, expensive, hacked.
Daily reminder that connecting everything to the cloud was a terrible idea and should never have happened like it did.
I 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.
How is it resistant? Can't all the pdfs just be leaked?
Right, 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.
Presumably 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.