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The Day the Telnet Died

labs.greynoise.io

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Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#111

Post by spott »

nine_k wrote: post #47
charcircuit wrote: post #36

The design of telnet and ssh where you have a daemon running as root is bad security that as shown here is a liability, a ticking time bomb ready to give attackers root.

What do you think proper architecture would be, given that ssh needs a capability to let root logins? I suppose it could be via a proper PAM module, which is widely supported. Too bad the first PAM RFC was published about the same time the first be version of ssh was released.

Does ssh need to allow root logins?

Sshing as a regular user and then sudo to root works 95% of the time…

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#113

Post by tripdout »

accrual wrote: post #97
davebranton wrote: post #8

Why would somebody read something that somebody couldn't be bothered to write? This article is AI slop.

What stood out as AI written? It felt like a well-written article by an SME to me.

Not the original commenter, but I noticed it too. I guess it's hard since AI is trained on human content, so presumably humans write like this too, but a few that stood out to me:

> Five entire countries vanished from GreyNoise telnet data: Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Canada, Poland, and Egypt. Not reduced — zero.

> An attacker sends -f root as the username value, and login(1) obediently skips authentication, handing over a root shell. No credentials required. No user interaction.

> The GreyNoise Global Observation Grid recorded a sudden, sustained collapse in global telnet traffic — not a gradual decline, not scanner attrition, not a data pipeline problem, but a step function. One hour, ~74,000 sessions. The next, ~22,000.

> That kind of step function — propagating within a single hour window — reads as a configuration change on routing infrastructure, not behavioral drift in scanning populations.

(and I'm not just pointing these out because of the em dashes)

GPTZero (which is just another AI model that can have similar flaws and is definitely not infallible, but is at least another data point) rates my excerpts as 78% chance AI written, 22% chance of AI-human mix.

To me at least, the article still seems to be majority human-written, though.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#114

Post by p_ing »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #109

An RCE in GNU's telnetd has no relationship to the sunsetting of telnet. Something could equally likely happen with SSH (but not really because the OpenBSD folks are paranoid by nature). Apple removing the telnet client from OS X was a stupid move. How can you call yourself UNIX and not have a telnet client? It's like removing grep or ed.

Thats what the mystery exceptions for the Open Group macOS UNIX certification was for!

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#115

Post by cbarrick »

jaredsohn wrote: post #30
trebligdivad wrote: post #24

Why are people still using telnet across the internet in this century? Was this _all_ attack traffic? (OK, I know one ancient talker that uses it - but on a very non-standard port so a port 23 block wouldn't be relevant)

To watch Star Wars in ASCII. telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhcf6tc2jeQ (Remember hearing about this a long time ago (from some searching I think it was in 1999 via Slashdot) and verified some instance of it still exists/works.)

~~IIRC the blinkenlights telnet movies have been offline for a few years already.~~

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#116

Post by jaredsohn »

cbarrick wrote: post #115
jaredsohn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To watch Star Wars in ASCII. telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhcf6tc2jeQ (Remember hearing about this a long time ago (from some searching I think it was in 1999 via Slashdot) and verified some instance of it still exists/works.)

~~IIRC the blinkenlights telnet movies have been offline for a few years already.~~

I connected a few times today to the IPv4 one. Have had no problems myself.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#117

Post by snazz »

Am I the only one who feels like it isn't the responsibility of backbone ISPs to filter traffic like this? In the case of a DDoS situation I could get behind it, but in this case I feel as though it's not Cogent's problem if I want to use telnet from a device on Charter's network to a Vultr VPS, even if it may be ill-advised.

(Of course, the article only speculates that this traffic filtering is what's going on; there isn't any hard proof, but it feels plausible to me.)

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#118

Post by paulddraper »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #109

An RCE in GNU's telnetd has no relationship to the sunsetting of telnet. Something could equally likely happen with SSH (but not really because the OpenBSD folks are paranoid by nature). Apple removing the telnet client from OS X was a stupid move. How can you call yourself UNIX and not have a telnet client? It's like removing grep or ed.

There's no UNIX requirement for telnet.

Ubuntu does not include it by default (starting 16.04?). Most most distros don't.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#119

Post by anitil »

Quarrel wrote: post #107

What an amazing bug. I probably spent my first 10 years on the internet just using telnet. They were wild times. You could log ethernet traffic and see passwords. Towards the end of those we started to have a few more single-user machines, but the vast majority were old school many many user machines, where "root" was thought to be tightly restricted (of course, even then, in practice it wasn't if you were in the kno…

The more I work in software, the more amazed I am that anything works at all. There's likely so much low hanging fruit out there

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#120

Post by roywiggins »

taftster wrote: post #105
jwpapi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it was just ai written thats why.. unexpectedly so from greynoise.

Well, I mean, the first part is a song by Don McLean called American Pie. You might know that, unsure that everyone will pick it out though. One of the most famous play choices at karaoke bars these days too. I think because the song is a long story, of sorts? But it's a terribly long song and I will leave to take a smoke break anytime it gets chosen. You're going to be there for a good 10 minutes before it concludes…

The rest of it seems to be substantially edited by an LLM too, or at least it's composed much like LLM outputs often are these days: “not a gradual decline, not scanner attrition, not a data pipeline problem, but a step function.”

"Not X, not Y, not Z" is a common LLM tic, and there's a few more like it in there.

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