5 ms·

Makes me wonder how many modems are still sitting in some company's closet, forgotten but still hooked up and able to be used if you know the right tricks.

Aloha 8y ago
Judging by what I've seen - many. My company still uses modems for some things, we have devices that are configured via serial, they can act as a primitive getty, enough to do modem control anyhow - and so we dial in.
moj 8y ago
Several billion are being carried around right now in people's pockets, actually: the baseband processor in mobile phones use ATDT/Hayes commands to talk to the host processor(!). It's quite interesting how the command set has been extended for modern needs, for example see: https://www.u-blox.com/sites/default/files/u-blox-CEL_ATCommands_%28UBX-13002752%29.pdf https://www.u-blox.com/sites/default/files/u-blox-CEL_ATComm...
- tbodt 8y ago
  And they are an attack vector: https://atcommands.org https://atcommands.org
  - 3chelon 8y ago
    Yes, it was used to jailbreak some of the early iPhone models.
    - moj 8y ago
      > jailbreak [...] iPhone Also used in voting machines which "aren't connected to the internet" (!) e.g. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/02/22/are-voting-machine-modems-truly-divorced-from-the-internet/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/02/22/are-voting-machine-... Some of these GSM modems have AT-commands to upload & run sophisticated, persistent LUA scripts. (Scripts that can can make tcpip connections over GSM, communicate to host hardware via I2C or uart, send SMSs, etc). The possibilities are wide ranging, using officially supported features; no hacking necessary. see: https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/simcom_lua_application_note_v1.01.pdf https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/simcom_lua_application_n...
- woodrowbarlow 8y ago
  some land-mobile radios (tetra) too.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I kind of wish I'd never read that. Every time something like this comes up I remember a quote from A Deepness in the Sky [0] and shudder at the thought that we will be stuck with crappy software forever. [0] " There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. "
  - egypturnash 8y ago
    I think of this every time I watch a package manager compile the dependencies of dependencies of dependencies of dependencies [...] of the thing I am actually using.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    One of the things I love about that book is how he attacks below their layer of abstraction. This is a pattern you see over and over again in real life, people build a secure system at one layer, but don't consider all of the implications of the layers below. Indeed there is so much complexity hidden in those abstractions that it takes experts years to learn enough about them to understand the attacks. The people who do work in those layers aren't interested in security, they're just trying to get the things to work in the first place. Spectre/Meltdown are a good example of what happens when (after a couple of decades) the security guys finally understand what the architecture looks like at that level and start looking for vulnerabilities. This is also why you should be wary of devices and especially device drivers. This is why binary blobs in drivers are such a butt clencher. And then you're talking about drivers that are stupendously large and are more or less attached directly to your web browser.
creeble 8y ago
I need to keep an old IBM Thinkpad alive with WinXP for its internal modem for the express purpose of... maintaining the DoorKing entry gate in our neighborhood. The gate installer charges $350 to make remote changes to the gate programming otherwise. It has to be updated at least twice a year because daylight savings (which the 'dorking' as I like to call it don't do). It still manages to connect at 28.8 over my voip line at home, but just barely. edit: turns out to be xp not win7!!
- fencepost 8y ago
  Quick suggestion: image that drive and save the image, and if it's old enough to be PATA/IDE instead of SATA then hang on to a few drives from old laptops if you still have any.
  - ahje 8y ago
    There are IDE-to-CF adapters so one of those and a CF card should work as a drive if no spare IDE HDD's are available.
- toast0 8y ago
  I'm not sure if it's worthwhile to pursue, but the doorking model I have at home has an ethernet port, if your facilities permit, you could connect over that instead of over the modem. (I don't know how terrible their IP stack is though; I don't have enough pairs going to the device) Also: they're kind of overpriced in my opinion, but you can still buy USB based hardware modems, which would allow you to move this to a newer computer if needed, without having to worry about modem drivers.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  My IT department maintains an old WinXP box and a single POTS line so that I can dial in to a very large machine (about 30 feet tall, ten feet wide) once a month. The company that makes the machine is willing to upgrade to a fully wireless solution, but it would require a dedicated microwave link. That's actually cheaper than paying for the phone line, but "microwave link" is scary, and management won't approve it.
Spooky23 8y ago
They are starting to go away faster as people clean out closets and kill legacy connectivity and branch office servers. Plenty of unknown POTS lines are in old datacenters though!
reaperducer 8y ago
I tried to buy an old Hayes modem from fleaBay recently out of nostalgia. Nope. The working ones i good condition are going for what they cost when they were new!
fhars 8y ago
There is some kind of modem hidden in every fax machine https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2018/Fahrplan/events/9462.html https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2018/Fahrplan/events...

Aloha 8y ago

Judging by what I've seen - many. My company still uses modems for some things, we have devices that are configured via serial, they can act as a primitive getty, enough to do modem control anyhow - and so we dial in.

moj 8y ago

Several billion are being carried around right now in people's pockets, actually: the baseband processor in mobile phones use ATDT/Hayes commands to talk to the host processor(!). It's quite interesting how the command set has been extended for modern needs, for example see: https://www.u-blox.com/sites/default/files/u-blox-CEL_ATCommands_%28UBX-13002752%29.pdf https://www.u-blox.com/sites/default/files/u-blox-CEL_ATComm...

tbodt 8y ago
And they are an attack vector: https://atcommands.org https://atcommands.org
- 3chelon 8y ago
  Yes, it was used to jailbreak some of the early iPhone models.
  - moj 8y ago
    > jailbreak [...] iPhone Also used in voting machines which "aren't connected to the internet" (!) e.g. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/02/22/are-voting-machine-modems-truly-divorced-from-the-internet/ https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/02/22/are-voting-machine-... Some of these GSM modems have AT-commands to upload & run sophisticated, persistent LUA scripts. (Scripts that can can make tcpip connections over GSM, communicate to host hardware via I2C or uart, send SMSs, etc). The possibilities are wide ranging, using officially supported features; no hacking necessary. see: https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/simcom_lua_application_note_v1.01.pdf https://simcom.ee/documents/SIM5320/simcom_lua_application_n...
woodrowbarlow 8y ago
some land-mobile radios (tetra) too.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
I kind of wish I'd never read that. Every time something like this comes up I remember a quote from A Deepness in the Sky [0] and shudder at the thought that we will be stuck with crappy software forever. [0] " There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. "
- egypturnash 8y ago
  I think of this every time I watch a package manager compile the dependencies of dependencies of dependencies of dependencies [...] of the thing I am actually using.
- jandrese 8y ago
  One of the things I love about that book is how he attacks below their layer of abstraction. This is a pattern you see over and over again in real life, people build a secure system at one layer, but don't consider all of the implications of the layers below. Indeed there is so much complexity hidden in those abstractions that it takes experts years to learn enough about them to understand the attacks. The people who do work in those layers aren't interested in security, they're just trying to get the things to work in the first place. Spectre/Meltdown are a good example of what happens when (after a couple of decades) the security guys finally understand what the architecture looks like at that level and start looking for vulnerabilities. This is also why you should be wary of devices and especially device drivers. This is why binary blobs in drivers are such a butt clencher. And then you're talking about drivers that are stupendously large and are more or less attached directly to your web browser.

creeble 8y ago

I need to keep an old IBM Thinkpad alive with WinXP for its internal modem for the express purpose of... maintaining the DoorKing entry gate in our neighborhood. The gate installer charges $350 to make remote changes to the gate programming otherwise. It has to be updated at least twice a year because daylight savings (which the 'dorking' as I like to call it don't do). It still manages to connect at 28.8 over my voip line at home, but just barely. edit: turns out to be xp not win7!!

fencepost 8y ago
Quick suggestion: image that drive and save the image, and if it's old enough to be PATA/IDE instead of SATA then hang on to a few drives from old laptops if you still have any.
- ahje 8y ago
  There are IDE-to-CF adapters so one of those and a CF card should work as a drive if no spare IDE HDD's are available.
toast0 8y ago
I'm not sure if it's worthwhile to pursue, but the doorking model I have at home has an ethernet port, if your facilities permit, you could connect over that instead of over the modem. (I don't know how terrible their IP stack is though; I don't have enough pairs going to the device) Also: they're kind of overpriced in my opinion, but you can still buy USB based hardware modems, which would allow you to move this to a newer computer if needed, without having to worry about modem drivers.
reaperducer 8y ago
My IT department maintains an old WinXP box and a single POTS line so that I can dial in to a very large machine (about 30 feet tall, ten feet wide) once a month. The company that makes the machine is willing to upgrade to a fully wireless solution, but it would require a dedicated microwave link. That's actually cheaper than paying for the phone line, but "microwave link" is scary, and management won't approve it.

Spooky23 8y ago

They are starting to go away faster as people clean out closets and kill legacy connectivity and branch office servers. Plenty of unknown POTS lines are in old datacenters though!

reaperducer 8y ago

I tried to buy an old Hayes modem from fleaBay recently out of nostalgia. Nope. The working ones i good condition are going for what they cost when they were new!

fhars 8y ago

There is some kind of modem hidden in every fax machine https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2018/Fahrplan/events/9462.html https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2018/Fahrplan/events...