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German railway seeks IT admin to manage MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 systems (www.techspot.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What exactly is the issue? Everything mentioned is true.

It even goes further when you consider how newer technology often incorporates more technology, which means a greater attack surface.

Tell me you know nothing about cybersecurity without telling me you know nothing about cybersecurity.

Oh, the ironing. Sad how you have >100 upvotes.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Not sure how to link a reply on lemmy so I’ll just copy from another comment I wrote here:

I’m not talking about this specific instance, just that block of misinformation/generalisation. Saying that legacy systems are well-secured because they’re “battle tested” is sheer ignorance.

Take side-channel attacks for example. A timing attack is something programmers from the 60’s and 70’s would not have taken into account when writing their hashing algorithms. And speaking of hashing, what hashing algorithms were available back then? CRC32 or something similar? What about salting? You get the idea.

Not to mention that legacy operating systems don’t get security updates. Let’s assume that DOS is secure (which it definitely isn’t), but if that statement were correct, would it apply to Windows XP as well?

All I’m saying is that the article is dead wrong. As software developers in this century, we’ve come a long way. We’ve developed security best practices, written libraries and frameworks, and come up with mitigations for a lot of these security vulnerabilities. These solutions are something that closed-source legacy systems (and anything without active maintenance) would never benefit from.

The “ironing” is lost on you in this case.