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Comment by ktRolster | Hacker News Reader

A lot of financial systems are running COBOL on mainframes (which can look very pretty, check out the z13: https://www.google.com/search?q=z13&tbm=isch )

There was a talk last year at DefCon that went over mainframe vulnerabilities, and it was like a playground. The biggest barrier to entry is getting a mainframe to experiment with.

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This reminds me of an article on wired[1] where someone hacked into hosts that were hooked into legacy X.25 networks. And just like mainframes and COBOL, there are not very many engineers who understand X.25 networks today, and hence had a very relaxed security posture.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/05/maksym-igor-popov-fbi/

Thank you for that article. It's fantastic - I'm assuming you also read KrebsOnSecurity? There are similar kinds of stories there.

Once you are there, it is usually an open playground. These systems, however, are usually not on open networks and only pre-whitelisted connections are allowed.

> The biggest barrier to entry is getting a mainframe to experiment with.

Is there a barrier to emulating these systems? It's probably difficult (illegal?) to emulate the various Tandem operating systems on virtual hardware, but I'm sure there's a way.

I'd be shocked if there wasn't a turnkey AS/400 VM available.

It's trivial to emulate old versions of z/OS, have a look at Hercules -

http://www.hercules-390.org/

Not sure about OS/400 (IBM i) emulation, but you can get accounts to play with it seems -

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3487895/as400-emulator-or...

Well that's another motivation for them to move to a blockchain based thing.

Won't help if the software has bugs.

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