Technology

60101 readers

2065 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

844

German railway seeks IT admin to manage MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 systems (www.techspot.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

219 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What exactly is the issue? Everything mentioned is true.

It even goes further when you consider how newer technology often incorporates more technology, which means a greater attack surface.

Tell me you know nothing about cybersecurity without telling me you know nothing about cybersecurity.

Oh, the ironing. Sad how you have >100 upvotes.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Not sure how to link a reply on lemmy so I’ll just copy from another comment I wrote here:

I’m not talking about this specific instance, just that block of misinformation/generalisation. Saying that legacy systems are well-secured because they’re “battle tested” is sheer ignorance.

Take side-channel attacks for example. A timing attack is something programmers from the 60’s and 70’s would not have taken into account when writing their hashing algorithms. And speaking of hashing, what hashing algorithms were available back then? CRC32 or something similar? What about salting? You get the idea.

Not to mention that legacy operating systems don’t get security updates. Let’s assume that DOS is secure (which it definitely isn’t), but if that statement were correct, would it apply to Windows XP as well?

All I’m saying is that the article is dead wrong. As software developers in this century, we’ve come a long way. We’ve developed security best practices, written libraries and frameworks, and come up with mitigations for a lot of these security vulnerabilities. These solutions are something that closed-source legacy systems (and anything without active maintenance) would never benefit from.

The “ironing” is lost on you in this case.