Why older tech is sometimes safer from hackers

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

>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

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, which is cheaper and requires no licensing, but is also far more insecure. It needs almost constant patching to stay secure because the attack surface is so large.

Things that are plenty and cheap to replace are easy to hack because if you broke them, you could always try again...

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-...

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.

The Irish example seems good. Keeping the old tech in parallel rather than replacing

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"!

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.

Daily reminder that connecting everything to the cloud was a terrible idea and should never have happened like it did.

MS-DOS: Over 45 years, and STILL NO remote holes in the default install!

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