Why older tech is sometimes safer from hackers

(bbc.com)

16 points | by tchalla 2 hours ago

6 comments

  • jerf 17 minutes ago
    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.
  • torginus 3 minutes ago
    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.

  • high_na_euv 30 minutes 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    While I could understand using outdated or not popular protocols, then software with known vulns seems crazy when we are living in world of automated, ai assisted scanners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 7 minutes ago
      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?

  • postexitus 17 minutes ago
    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.
  • bell-cot 2 hours ago
    MS-DOS: Over 45 years, and STILL NO remote holes in the default install!
  • railwatching 31 minutes ago
    [flagged]