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> ...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 biz
by palmotea 2mo 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 2mo agoAnd the incompetent questions all came from defense contractors..
- kotaKat 2mo agoHey now, Flowers By Irene was just really connected to the World Wide Web back then. Who knew Teleflora was a secret numbers station?
- Fnoord 2mo agoMust 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).