Dailydave mailing list archives

Re: The long tail of vulnerable operating systems


From: Adriel Desautels <adriel () netragard com>
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2007 13:54:02 -0500

Kaite,
        The company with all of the old systems wouldn't be CFI by chance would it?

Regards,
        Adriel T. Desautels
        Chief Technology Officer
        Netragard, LLC.
        Office : 617-934-0269
        Mobile : 617-633-3821
        http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/118/a45

---------------------------------------------------------------
Netragard, LLC - http://www.netragard.com  -  "We make IT Safe"
Penetration Testing, Vulnerability Assessments, Website Security


Katie M wrote:
Hey Dave,
  Lots of places have older OSes deployed, perhaps only internally as
you mentioned, but companies are rife with them, and sometimes closer to
the perimeter than you'd expect.  On a consulting enagagement, I met a
Fortune 50 company that had a massive internal deployment of Windows 98
(yeah, I know, weird but here's why) because they had some biz critical
crapplication that nearly everyone needed to use that would only run on
Win98.  I told them to hire some developers or interns or somebody,
anybody, to rewrite the thing from scratch.  :-) 
 
  Of course they and all those other places that run old OSes *should*
welcome themselves into this millenium's operating systems -- we all
agree there.  No need to start arguing the obvious.  But the point is
that more than enough orgs (won't or) don't have the resources to
upgrade (or to update) due to app compatibility.  That's the reality and
the reason why attacking older OSes at a CTF-like event is still
pertinent and practical.
 
My 0.01 pence.
 
-Katie

 
On Nov 12, 2007 3:03 AM, Dave aitel <dave () immunityinc com
<mailto:dave () immunityinc com>> wrote:

So every CTF I've played recently (like the one at CSI last week) has a
target set of Windows 2000 and extremely old Linux (say, RedHat 8). I'm
pretty sure that on any modern network you don't find a whole lot of
either of these. There's always the people who still run NT4 and SCO
OpenServer, but you have to look pretty far for them. But yet, no real
remote exploits exist for Fedora Core 1, much less 7. Solaris has XFS
and a few other remotes, but no one runs Solaris any more except the US
Government, that I can tell. Even assuming you see some Solaris or AIX
or whatever, you end up being so deep in the network already to find it
that you've already got all the passwords and don't need exploits.

But old operating systems will continue to live forever in CTF, I
assume.

Sort of as a sign of the times, while I was playing CTF on the Windows
machine provided, I browsed the web briefly and my machine was
immediately taken over by some really annoying spyware. So for the rest
of the game I got to spend a lot of time clicking "close" on IE windows
that kept popping up.

Anyways, if you want to chat about it or grieve the pain of lost 0day,
and you live in London then you should come to Immunity Pub Night In
London Saturday Nov 24 at 6pm at the Price Arthur 80-82 Eversholt
Street. I'll put 200 quid on the bar to help you drown your sorrows.
RSVP to admin () immunityinc com <mailto:admin () immunityinc com>!

-dave
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