Re: COBOL Compiler for Windows



--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."
"Michael Wojcik" <mwojcik@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Pete Dashwood wrote:
"Bill Gunshannon" <billg999@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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I don't agree with any of your conclussions but this is the easiest
target. There are a lot of systems that have been connected to the
INTERNET since the ARPA and NSFNet days and have never had a virus.
Being on the net does not guarantee virus will just pop up.

You might well be right.

And why let facts get in the way of perfectly good speculation, eh?

However, I believe the "challenge" of an arcitecture that hasn't
previously been broken into (that we know about...) will prove pretty
irresistible to some of the people who write this stuff...:-)

Apparently this message has been inadvertently held by some server for a
quarter-century and only now forwarded on.

ARPAnet switched to TCP/IP in 1983. I'd be willing to bet that before the
year was up, there were S/370s running VM/CMS connected to the Internet.
MIT likely had one, for example, given their close relationship with IBM's
Cambridge Scientific Center and the popularity of CMS (which was written
at CSC) in academia.

I know personally of sites that had S/390s (running OS/390, CICS, and IMS)
with non-firewalled Internet connections in the early 1990s. Certainly at
least since 1990 or so there were many AS/400s and S/390s connected to the
Internet. (Prior to 1990, read "S/370" in place of "S/390".) Often they
were behind firewalls, but not always.

In the early 1980s, there were plenty of black hats and curious kids
trying to break into systems of all sorts over dialup connections, using
war-dialing modems to find targets. I knew a number of them, and the
exploits of the more famous are well-documented in journals like _2600_,
not to mention various personal retrospectives, academic studies, etc.

There were also plenty of mainframe systems on other networks that were
open to college students and other ... curious ... parties. All of BITNET,
for example.

Many of these systems were penetrated to some extent by unauthorized
users; many were not.

The hardware architecture is only one small part of the security of a
system. Certainly the capability architecture of the AS/400 / iSeries
makes it resistant to many of the forms of attack that are popular against
more conventional virtual-memory computers, for example. But many exploits
target vulnerabilities in the operating system, and far more in
applications, in system administration errors, and - above all - in users,
who remain the weakest link in the security chain.

In short, there is nothing new about various "mainframe" platforms being
Internet-accessible, or otherwise available to hackers and writers of
malware. The relative lack of documented malware (there are exceptions,
like IBM's own "christmas card" trojan) for these platforms can be
attributed to many things: smaller profile, smaller attack surface,
generally more conservative administration, less casual use, and so forth.
But it cannot reasonably be attributed to a historical unavailability to
attackers, so there is no "new challenge" for them to find there.

OK. If I have this right, you are saying I was wrong to suggest they will be
penetrated once they take over the role of "network server" (as some people
suggested they will), because they've been connected to the network for
years already, and have already been penetrated?

Fair enough.

Thanks for the history, very interesting.

Pete.
--
"I used to write COBOL...now I can do anything."


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