4 ms·
Back in the mid 90's, everyone on my college residential network had static, public IPs, no firewalls or filtering. Different times.
by icedchai 5y ago
Back in the mid 90's, everyone on my college residential network had static, public IPs, no firewalls or filtering. Different times.
- nisegami 5y agoThis was still essentially the case at my university ~3 years ago (and likely still is). There was a firewall by default, but it was a simple form to fill out to have it disabled.
- vehemenz 5y agoTrue in the early 00's as well.
- nomel 5y agoUsually resulting in a Windows computer being powned before patches could even be applied: https://it.slashdot.org/story/04/08/17/1347214/survival-time-for-unpatched-systems-cut-by-half https://it.slashdot.org/story/04/08/17/1347214/survival-time... Note: The graph url is dead.
- vehemenz 5y agoYes, I remember this well. I put an unpatched Windows 2000 machine on the network, and the system logs were littered with intrusion attempts—more than 500—after being online for a few minutes.
- shadowgovt 5y agoThe difference in different institutions of higher learning is huge. Some have entire IPv4 subnets. Others have a grand total of three public IP addresses to distribute across every user on the campus.
- ollien 5y agoYep - my alma mater, a technical school, has a /16.
- at-fates-hands 5y agoBack in the late 90's, My roommate took down a neighboring universities network for a few hours over a dispute on a bulletin board. He was a TA for the engineering department and simply walked into the library, told the person behind the counter he was a TA and needed two professors email and password credentials. He then used those credentials to hack into the neighboring universities network (not very hard either - apparently a simple dictionary attack got him in as a root user) and start wreaking havoc under these professors names. Yes for sure different times. Still laugh about how easy it was for him to get credentials which gave him a sort of 'super user' privilege's on our own network just by having professor credentials.
- icedchai 5y agoWe had similar things happen around here, with "elite" BBS users hacking into the local college and university CS departments to get internet access. Mostly, they just wanted to get on IRC. Typically these were Sun-3 / SunOS 4.x boxes using YP/NIS. "ypcat passwd" would get you an unshadowed password file that you could start cracking...
- deathanatos 5y agoThis was true at my university, in the late aughts. Public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. … 15+ years later, and my ISP (Verizon) still hasn't caught up…
- aidenn0 5y agoTrue in early '00s as well, and this is why I burned a CD with the XP service pack on it; code red would infect a fresh install of XP faster than you could download the update to patch the problem...
- anderspitman 5y agoOh man. Service Pack 2. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.