How secure were dial-up Unix shell ISP's back then? What about today? reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-06-03 18:23 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- denzuko · 2019-06-03 19:44 Your about right, some even had SLIP, and a few rarely had kermit or uucp. If one has ever looked over the [CVE list for cisco](https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-1999-0162) or sun's pppd they would see exactly how wide open and "secure" things were back then plus add in the fact that most passwords where less than 8 character dictionary words or the factory default; it was fairly easy to just guess or get lucky and come across something that was wide open out of the box. Plus, anything before CVE-1999-001 was all security through obscurity so would get passed around boards like Hackers' Haven and CDC, alt.hack and others. As for any other sense of security, well let's just say satan/saint was a very "fun" program back in the day and if anyone was clever enough they could go Beige box and then replay the tape to another modem to get the usually md5 or plaintext sent password. ​ I can neither confirm nor deny that this was ever done in the field but I'm fairly sure 2600 or binrev has an article about it in their archives. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- vga256 · 2019-06-03 22:52 Secure in terms of direct connections, sure. But most of them also offered terminal and FTP connections via the same server, or via a server on the same network. More often than not, username lists were easily browsable opening up account passwords to brute force and dictionary attacks. At least, that was my experience on the University dial-up ISP I had back then.