5 ms·

I remember those days. Even into the late 90s early 2000, modems (including ADSL) didn't come with a router, you had to establish a PPPoE connection from your

by cm2187 3y ago

I remember those days. Even into the late 90s early 2000, modems (including ADSL) didn't come with a router, you had to establish a PPPoE connection from your computer, which also means your home machine was directly on the WAN with no firewall protection. I can't remember which version of windows but it must have been 98 or ME, you had to rush to download and install a patch when you connected it first to the internet before one of these exploits would make it crash. The introduction of NAT changed all of that.

roomey 3y ago
Yes. I remember they would send UPS call to reboot your pc, within seconds of going online. A little popup saying visit such and such site to stop your pc rebooting, and a countdown timer
jacquesm 3y ago
> I can't remember which version of windows but it must have been 98 or ME, you had to rush to download and install a patch when you connected it first to the internet before one of these exploits would make it crash. Even Win2K had that feature.
wazoox 3y ago
IIRC Windows XP up to SP2 was vulnerable to this. Basically if you ran the install with the DSL modem attached, your PC was compromised even before the end of setup.
- pcdoodle 3y ago
  LSASS.exe would crash with about 5 minutes of IBR (Internet Background Radiation). I cant remember the name of the worm. XP SP3 fixed this.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    > IBR (Internet Background Radiation) that is really unpleasant.. engineers worked, companies worked and volunteers also worked to make the modern Internet, then selfish-clever, thieving, control-oriented militaristic jerks from WINDOWS filled the content with WINDOWS virus activity to play cheap stealing tricks on unsuspecting people. And you call it "the Internet" .. it has nothing to do with "the Internet" as much as the cheap and aggressive culture of BS from WINDOWS at that time
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Windows deserves a lot of criticism, but let's be honest and fair here... this would have been the case regardless of what OS was dominant.
      - mingus88 3y ago
        It would be more fair to criticize the corporate culture at Microsoft in the 90s that led to this situation. They simply didn't really care. If another OS was dominant, it is easy to argue that fundamental security issues could have been addressed in a better fashion, if management wanted it to be so. To wit, this is the same era of computing that spawned OpenBSD. You can't say with a straight face that OpenBSD would have been brought down by oversized ping packets or be allowed to accept traffic out of the box like Windows was.
        mistrial9 3y ago
        totally agree -- lived it
        pcdoodle 3y ago
        AOL had a fun one in the instant messaging HTML interpreter: <font size=9999999999999999999999999999999999> would bring a system down instantly.
- owenmarshall 3y ago
  When W32/Blaster[0] came out I worked at a small ISP doing tech support and computer repair. A tech and I imaged an old box we had in the corner with a clean XP, assigned it a static IP in our /24, plugged it in and started a stopwatch. It didn’t even make it two minutes before it was infected. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(computer_worm) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(computer_worm)
  - pixl97 3y ago
    I was working for a small ISP in that time frame and that's when we started blocking incoming windows ports. And yea, it was annoying for the few techie types that tried to run SMB and could actually protect their stuff. For the other 99.9% percent of the users it protected them and us. Windows was such a mess back then.
  - eterm 3y ago
    Yeah Blaster is one of the few worms I've ever (knowingly) been infected with. As you say, it was literally less than a minute or two between connecting an unpatched box and getting it.
  - jtbayly 3y ago
    It took about 5 seconds IIRC on our college campus network.
tivert 3y ago
> Even into the late 90s early 2000, modems (including ADSL) didn't come with a router, you had to establish a PPPoE connection from your computer, which also means your home machine was directly on the WAN with no firewall protection. Even today modems don't always come with a routers. In fact, I like them that way :). IIRC, the problem in the late 90s/early 2000s was routers were thought of as only necessary to get multiple computers online, and it was pretty common for people households to only own a single desktop. There wasn't enough security consciousness earned through repeated failure, so it "made sense" to direct connect consumer machines to the internet. We actually had a LAN years before we had broadband, and I setup a PC running Linux as a router to share our 33.6 modem to the household. But before that? The PC direct dials into the ISP, and got a publicly-routable IP.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Even today modems don't always come with a routers. In fact, I like them that way :). I agree. I have a better router that I'm going to use anyway, so I disable the router functionality in the modem if it has one. My current one has no router or WiFi. Perfect!
hedora 3y ago
This discussion is so funny. I never encountered any of this, except that one roommate liked to brag about his expensive win 9x box, and me and another roommate would take turns using our junky linux and nt desktops to “pause” his machine with “ping -f”, usually in the middle of a lecture about how amazingly fast it was. Later, we had an openbsd router running on an old 386 that we jammed a few old 10MBit 3com cards into (later, Linux, plus $20 ne2000’s). Those things had 100% uptime other than power outages, ne2000 swaps, and the time I unplugged it after 50 gallons of water ran through it (stayed up, worked fine after I made a new copy of the soggy boot floppy). Later we ended up with some shitty belkin router, etc. “Unplug it and plug it back in? Really?” Eventually, I got a WRT54GL (emphasis on the L) which worked for a few years. Now I’m back on OpenBSD. The only software downtime is due to PG&E power cycling it 100 times, and fsck expecting me to send a “y” over the serial port one of those times. Now it is double battery backed. It works, but I’m living in fear of the day my PC Engines APU board finally gives up the ghost. Also, sometimes our starlink’s linux cpu hangs. You’d think they could get that right. It’s not like it’s as hard as building a car, launching rockets, or operating a network that’s used for public safety announcements.

by cm2187 3y ago

roomey 3y ago

Yes. I remember they would send UPS call to reboot your pc, within seconds of going online. A little popup saying visit such and such site to stop your pc rebooting, and a countdown timer

jacquesm 3y ago

> I can't remember which version of windows but it must have been 98 or ME, you had to rush to download and install a patch when you connected it first to the internet before one of these exploits would make it crash. Even Win2K had that feature.

wazoox 3y ago

IIRC Windows XP up to SP2 was vulnerable to this. Basically if you ran the install with the DSL modem attached, your PC was compromised even before the end of setup.

pcdoodle 3y ago
LSASS.exe would crash with about 5 minutes of IBR (Internet Background Radiation). I cant remember the name of the worm. XP SP3 fixed this.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  > IBR (Internet Background Radiation) that is really unpleasant.. engineers worked, companies worked and volunteers also worked to make the modern Internet, then selfish-clever, thieving, control-oriented militaristic jerks from WINDOWS filled the content with WINDOWS virus activity to play cheap stealing tricks on unsuspecting people. And you call it "the Internet" .. it has nothing to do with "the Internet" as much as the cheap and aggressive culture of BS from WINDOWS at that time
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Windows deserves a lot of criticism, but let's be honest and fair here... this would have been the case regardless of what OS was dominant.
    - mingus88 3y ago
      It would be more fair to criticize the corporate culture at Microsoft in the 90s that led to this situation. They simply didn't really care. If another OS was dominant, it is easy to argue that fundamental security issues could have been addressed in a better fashion, if management wanted it to be so. To wit, this is the same era of computing that spawned OpenBSD. You can't say with a straight face that OpenBSD would have been brought down by oversized ping packets or be allowed to accept traffic out of the box like Windows was.
      - mistrial9 3y ago
        totally agree -- lived it
      - pcdoodle 3y ago
        AOL had a fun one in the instant messaging HTML interpreter: <font size=9999999999999999999999999999999999> would bring a system down instantly.
owenmarshall 3y ago
When W32/Blaster[0] came out I worked at a small ISP doing tech support and computer repair. A tech and I imaged an old box we had in the corner with a clean XP, assigned it a static IP in our /24, plugged it in and started a stopwatch. It didn’t even make it two minutes before it was infected. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(computer_worm) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(computer_worm)
- pixl97 3y ago
  I was working for a small ISP in that time frame and that's when we started blocking incoming windows ports. And yea, it was annoying for the few techie types that tried to run SMB and could actually protect their stuff. For the other 99.9% percent of the users it protected them and us. Windows was such a mess back then.
- eterm 3y ago
  Yeah Blaster is one of the few worms I've ever (knowingly) been infected with. As you say, it was literally less than a minute or two between connecting an unpatched box and getting it.
- jtbayly 3y ago
  It took about 5 seconds IIRC on our college campus network.

tivert 3y ago

> Even into the late 90s early 2000, modems (including ADSL) didn't come with a router, you had to establish a PPPoE connection from your computer, which also means your home machine was directly on the WAN with no firewall protection. Even today modems don't always come with a routers. In fact, I like them that way :). IIRC, the problem in the late 90s/early 2000s was routers were thought of as only necessary to get multiple computers online, and it was pretty common for people households to only own a single desktop. There wasn't enough security consciousness earned through repeated failure, so it "made sense" to direct connect consumer machines to the internet. We actually had a LAN years before we had broadband, and I setup a PC running Linux as a router to share our 33.6 modem to the household. But before that? The PC direct dials into the ISP, and got a publicly-routable IP.

JohnFen 3y ago
> Even today modems don't always come with a routers. In fact, I like them that way :). I agree. I have a better router that I'm going to use anyway, so I disable the router functionality in the modem if it has one. My current one has no router or WiFi. Perfect!

hedora 3y ago

This discussion is so funny. I never encountered any of this, except that one roommate liked to brag about his expensive win 9x box, and me and another roommate would take turns using our junky linux and nt desktops to “pause” his machine with “ping -f”, usually in the middle of a lecture about how amazingly fast it was. Later, we had an openbsd router running on an old 386 that we jammed a few old 10MBit 3com cards into (later, Linux, plus $20 ne2000’s). Those things had 100% uptime other than power outages, ne2000 swaps, and the time I unplugged it after 50 gallons of water ran through it (stayed up, worked fine after I made a new copy of the soggy boot floppy). Later we ended up with some shitty belkin router, etc. “Unplug it and plug it back in? Really?” Eventually, I got a WRT54GL (emphasis on the L) which worked for a few years. Now I’m back on OpenBSD. The only software downtime is due to PG&E power cycling it 100 times, and fsck expecting me to send a “y” over the serial port one of those times. Now it is double battery backed. It works, but I’m living in fear of the day my PC Engines APU board finally gives up the ghost. Also, sometimes our starlink’s linux cpu hangs. You’d think they could get that right. It’s not like it’s as hard as building a car, launching rockets, or operating a network that’s used for public safety announcements.