this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 130 points 9 months ago (33 children)

Legacy hardware and operating systems are battle tested, having been extensively probed and patched during their heyday. The same can be said for software written for these platforms – they have been refined to the point that they can execute their intended tasks without incident. If it is ain't broke, don't fix it. One could also argue that dated platforms are less likely to be targeted by modern cybercriminals. Learning the ins and outs of a legacy system does not make sense when there are so few targets still using them. A hacker would be far better off to master something newer that millions of systems still use.

Tell me you know nothing about cybersecurity without telling me you know nothing about cybersecurity. Wtf is this drivel?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (7 children)

It really depends if these systems (that appear to control arrival boards) are on a network or not. If they're not, then there is minimal risk to leave them the way they are. Somebody would need physical access to the devices to do harm. If they are on a network then that's a pretty big deal, but some attacks could be mitigated against by tunnelling and/or additional packet filtering to ensure the integrity of messages.

Continuing on a railway theme you should be FAR more worried all the devices that run up and down the side of railway lines - PLCs that talk with each other and operations centres to control things like lights, junctions, crossings etc. If they're more than 5 years old then chances are then all that traffic is in the clear, and because these things live in boxes by the railway line, it wouldn't take much to break into a network and potentially kill people by running two trains into each other.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (5 children)

the job was advertised as being remote.....

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Well yes. You can code software remotely. That doesn't mean the end system is reachable through the network. Given it's DB, I bet these systems are still patched by floppy. Until very recently they've used floppy's to distribute train schedules to be displayed in the train.

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