[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD 12.0 end-of-life

[@lbutlr]

On 16 May 2020, at 13:54, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
> On Sat, 16 May 2020 12:56:25 -0600, @lbutlr wrote:
>> Otherwise, old OSes are porous insecure botnets-in-wait with
>> dozens or hundreds or thousands of exploits.
> 
> That is true, but is significant only as far as those systems
> interact with other things, especially over Internet.

If the computer is air-gapped, that is one thing. If the computer is on a network and that network is air gapped, that is something else. Oof that computer is on a network and any machines on that network have access to the Internet, then that old insecure machine should be assumed to be on the Internet.

Just look at the many exploits for non-Internet connected LAN printers.

> I just want to provide an example that "younger people" (TM)
> might find strange: In mainframe world, you can still compile
> and run programs written in a way to read data from a punched
> card reader and write data to a chain printer or a tape drive.
> There is no need to modify the source in order to run such a
> program on a current mainframe with a current OS. To a certain
> extent, you even have native binary compatibility.

And when you have old tools that allow you to, for example, load information off a tape, you have an attack vector that probably hasn’t been secure because it was written before we figured out that security was important (because people suck) and no one has gone back to look at how exploitable that code is on a modern system.



-- 
What we have here is a failure to communicate.