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Back in 90s. I commented to a friend that there sure were a lot of NASA employees on A certain IRC channel. His response was NASA had great computers and no sec

• sybercecurity 3y ago
  Heck, I've heard stories that several big agencies only started deploying firewalls at their network perimeter in the late 90's. I guess one of the saving graces was that a lot of stuff like personnel records were hard to reach or still only on paper.
  • stonogo 3y ago
    Perimeter security with firewalls didn't really come into vogue until the mid 1990s (post-Cheswick and Bellovin), so that seems like a pretty speedy adoption for a big agency.
• qingcharles 3y ago
  In the 90s I would be hard-pressed to name any of my techie chums who didn't have a shell account on a NASA box, through legal or illegal means. NASA also had some great cables and satellite runs between their facilities and other partners overseas that allowed for moving warez and porn very quickly across the Atlantic when the commercial connection between the UK and USA was something like 2Mbps for the entire country.
• icedchai 3y ago
  Around here, it was the local college and universities. My friend, in high school at the time, pwned CS departments at both an Ivy and state college, gave out dozens of cracked SunOS accounts to BBSers and script kiddies (the password file was unshadowed...) Tying up all the dialups with IRC and the non-stop downloading of warez eventually brought the attention of sysadmins, but it went on for months.