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Comment by merpkz | Hacker News Reader

> Never put a console running DC Linux outside of a firewall: it is an intentionally insecure system. Any bot scanning your network will get root immediately.

And do what exactly then, deploy it's x86/64 Monero miner?

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Can't find the source, but I remember reading a secondhand tale from early 2010s that sets at a CTF convention - a NetBSD/Dreamcast unit becomes the last one standing in it, for no one bothered to `uname -a` on it, and could not figure out why every binary payloads would just segfault. Probably cannot happen today with the likelihood of ARM and RISC-V machines in there...

This is delightful. I wonder if anyone there could have done anything if they had known what they were dealing with.

Back in 1999 there was a similar contest: https://static.lwn.net/1999/0812/bigpage.php3#security

I once had an IP address connected to an SGI Irix machine (v 6.5!) pass a security audit because the tool automatically scanning it couldn't identify what the hell it was, why none of the standard SSH key exchange algorithms were accepted, and concluded it was likely a honeypot automatically.

Those kinds of boxes I always ask for permission to poke at a little more and see what they really can be cracked with. Its good fun poking old shit on the network and seeing how it falls over!

Which is doubly funny because if I remember correctly irix was not all that secure out of the box. SGI highly recommended you run it behind a firewall. it was very chatty and ran a lot of services.

> it was very chatty and ran a lot of services

lol, definitely going to get flagged as a honeypot then:)

I mean, the obvious thing to do would be to make it a node in a DDOS for hire botnet.

I have much doubt that bot could deploy a code capable of executing on this vintage CPU architecture - security through obsolescence.

You're right that probably nobody is targeting this... but also i imagine that dreamcast linux probably comes with a copy of perl and other common userland. No need to make platform specific code here. Just use a scripting language.

20y/o perl and userland. Chances what your obfuscated, top (well not so top) notch code would run on it are slim.

20 year old Perl would be Perl 5.6 or 5.8, any Perl code that doesn't use:

  use 5.010; # Or higher...

...would run. Yes, giving up on say and function signatures would be unfortunate, but Perl code tends to have very good backwards compatibility.

It’s not a valuable target platform, but you don’t need much CPU or memory to do a DoS. I know how to pull all circuit breakers in my apps and those endpoints WILL see even a puny node trying such shenanigans. Also, DDoS mitigation will kick in almost immediately.

Uh, guys, I just ported C++20 to the thing and the absolute latest tip of GCC12.2.0, Binutils, and Newlib. I'm also in the process of porting the Objective-C foundation framework to it as well... you have no idea how good the development tools are. This shit's more modern than what I have running on my host machine. lmao.

The SuperH is still fully supported by the GCC toolchain and is well maintained.

Also the guy behind compiler explorer, Matt Godbolt, himself was a DC developer and has added the SH architecture there as well.

https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiOS/commit/99c716c8915f...

The most obvious abuse would be to use it as a simple proxy.

a jumphost to all the other nodes in your network.

Gain access to other more sensitive machines via your LAN I guess.

PWNing you in Sonic.

The rule here is simple - if you can own my network, you’ll have to manage it.

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