Subj : War Dialing in 2023 and Beyond
To   : All
From : warmfuzzy
Date : Tue Aug 01 2023 01:52:34

Is War Dialing (from the classic movie "War Games") still a thing?  I think so.  There are a lot of big corporations that still have a remote access option though the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS).  In my last corporation that I worked for they had what seemed to be an active and yet never used RJ-11 plug in the staff lounge.  The server tower was about 20 meters away, and one could imagine how a person could install a wifi pipe from the server closet to the staff lounge and the wire connected to a nano computer that is both hard to detect and not in plain sight.

This is just a thought.  I have not hacked them nor will I.  I'm just considering how easy it would be to add a backdoor to the building.  Their system is fairly secure, they use Active Directory (I think), and their internal network is encrypted.  However, lets say you just want some sort of secure method to communicate to "home base" without worrying about back-tracing your comms.  This could be done by hooking the internal ethernet connection to a POTS computer, etc. etc.  So it would be very slow (at about 7 K/sec), but if you're looking to find some sort of way to talk with, your paranoid friends using a method of proxying like this can be in place for the worst case scenario.

No, I haven't tried this, again I'm not going to, but hypothetically a setup like this can be done on systems that are so large that they can't easily be secured.

A nearby library also had a dial-in using an old 28.8 kbps to get into their library catalog remotely.  It is doubtful that the admins at that library even realize that there is still a BBS on their network.

A modern day phone phreak can still find lots of juicy networks to explore, but rather than in the past where they would access active communication routes, the routes now-a-days have been forgotten about, just being left and completely forgotten about.

Cheers!
-warmfuzzy

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