4 ms·

“Nobody had business cards” That sounds accurate. I worked for a NIC company that had one of the first full speed 10GbE packet sniffers in the early 2000s, an

“Nobody had business cards” That sounds accurate. I worked for a NIC company that had one of the first full speed 10GbE packet sniffers in the early 2000s, and some of our customers were 3-letter govt agencies. We'd get support requests / bug reports with almost no details from random aol.com addresses. It was bizarre.

palmotea 1mo ago
> ...some of our customers were 3-letter govt agencies. We'd get support requests / bug reports with almost no details from random aol.com addresses. It was bizarre. You'd think they could at least setup a front company at least. Using AOL addresses that way seems too suspicious. Competent person using AOL with a weird technical question? Must be the NSA.
- drewg123 1mo ago
  And the incompetent questions all came from defense contractors..
- kotaKat 1mo ago
  Hey now, Flowers By Irene was just really connected to the World Wide Web back then. Who knew Teleflora was a secret numbers station?
- Fnoord 1mo ago
  Must be -> could be. Which is the point. And it is an easy way to communicate based on merit. It is likely done from a terminal with 'normal internet access', next to one of the intranet ones (or even airgapped) where the issue is occurring. Even if you'd be able to hack AOL, you'd likely end up on a dead end, or a front company. There's an added bonus: NSA might even know who it was/is internally, so someone who isn't in the 'in group' would get noticed. You can notice something similar on Ghidra or Cyberchef repos. People in government agencies and military follow this M.O. all the time; hiding in plain sight. Nowadays, probably Gmail fullfils the very same role, with a caveat: clearly available world-wide. For Germany, this used to be GMX or T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom).
raverbashing 1mo ago
Funny You know there's the "excessive formalism and thorough certifications" for some gov positions (sounds like red lamp), but I don't doubt there's the "you didn't see anything" level where the objective is to pretend it's just a disinterested party asking some funny questions.
TMWNN 1mo ago
>We'd get support requests / bug reports with almost no details from random aol.com addresses. It was bizarre. I suppose this is the equivalent to how the first delivery of funds to Lockheed to build the U-2 was sent to Kelly Johnson's home as opposed to his Skunk Works office.

palmotea 1mo ago

> ...some of our customers were 3-letter govt agencies. We'd get support requests / bug reports with almost no details from random aol.com addresses. It was bizarre. You'd think they could at least setup a front company at least. Using AOL addresses that way seems too suspicious. Competent person using AOL with a weird technical question? Must be the NSA.

drewg123 1mo ago
And the incompetent questions all came from defense contractors..
kotaKat 1mo ago
Hey now, Flowers By Irene was just really connected to the World Wide Web back then. Who knew Teleflora was a secret numbers station?
Fnoord 1mo ago
Must be -> could be. Which is the point. And it is an easy way to communicate based on merit. It is likely done from a terminal with 'normal internet access', next to one of the intranet ones (or even airgapped) where the issue is occurring. Even if you'd be able to hack AOL, you'd likely end up on a dead end, or a front company. There's an added bonus: NSA might even know who it was/is internally, so someone who isn't in the 'in group' would get noticed. You can notice something similar on Ghidra or Cyberchef repos. People in government agencies and military follow this M.O. all the time; hiding in plain sight. Nowadays, probably Gmail fullfils the very same role, with a caveat: clearly available world-wide. For Germany, this used to be GMX or T-Mobile (Deutsche Telekom).

raverbashing 1mo ago

Funny You know there's the "excessive formalism and thorough certifications" for some gov positions (sounds like red lamp), but I don't doubt there's the "you didn't see anything" level where the objective is to pretend it's just a disinterested party asking some funny questions.

TMWNN 1mo ago

>We'd get support requests / bug reports with almost no details from random aol.com addresses. It was bizarre. I suppose this is the equivalent to how the first delivery of funds to Lockheed to build the U-2 was sent to Kelly Johnson's home as opposed to his Skunk Works office.