https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_of_death
I also remember SMB vulnerabilities that stayed unpatched for years on some machines. That was already when Metasploit existed, so you could inject VNC into most Windows hosts on local network with just a few commands. These days at least the patching is super fast.
Even into the late 90s early 2000, modems (including ADSL) didn't come with a router, you had to establish a PPPoE connection from your computer, which also means your home machine was directly on the WAN with no firewall protection.
I can't remember which version of windows but it must have been 98 or ME, you had to rush to download and install a patch when you connected it first to the internet before one of these exploits would make it crash.
The introduction of NAT changed all of that.
I never encountered any of this, except that one roommate liked to brag about his expensive win 9x box, and me and another roommate would take turns using our junky linux and nt desktops to “pause” his machine with “ping -f”, usually in the middle of a lecture about how amazingly fast it was.
Later, we had an openbsd router running on an old 386 that we jammed a few old 10MBit 3com cards into (later, Linux, plus $20 ne2000’s).
Those things had 100% uptime other than power outages, ne2000 swaps, and the time I unplugged it after 50 gallons of water ran through it (stayed up, worked fine after I made a new copy of the soggy boot floppy).
Later we ended up with some shitty belkin router, etc. “Unplug it and plug it back in? Really?”
Eventually, I got a WRT54GL (emphasis on the L) which worked for a few years.
Now I’m back on OpenBSD. The only software downtime is due to PG&E power cycling it 100 times, and fsck expecting me to send a “y” over the serial port one of those times. Now it is double battery backed.
It works, but I’m living in fear of the day my PC Engines APU board finally gives up the ghost.
Also, sometimes our starlink’s linux cpu hangs. You’d think they could get that right. It’s not like it’s as hard as building a car, launching rockets, or operating a network that’s used for public safety announcements.
Even today modems don't always come with a routers. In fact, I like them that way :).
IIRC, the problem in the late 90s/early 2000s was routers were thought of as only necessary to get multiple computers online, and it was pretty common for people households to only own a single desktop. There wasn't enough security consciousness earned through repeated failure, so it "made sense" to direct connect consumer machines to the internet.
We actually had a LAN years before we had broadband, and I setup a PC running Linux as a router to share our 33.6 modem to the household. But before that? The PC direct dials into the ISP, and got a publicly-routable IP.
I agree. I have a better router that I'm going to use anyway, so I disable the router functionality in the modem if it has one.
My current one has no router or WiFi. Perfect!
For the other 99.9% percent of the users it protected them and us.
Windows was such a mess back then.
that is really unpleasant.. engineers worked, companies worked and volunteers also worked to make the modern Internet, then selfish-clever, thieving, control-oriented militaristic jerks from WINDOWS filled the content with WINDOWS virus activity to play cheap stealing tricks on unsuspecting people. And you call it "the Internet" .. it has nothing to do with "the Internet" as much as the cheap and aggressive culture of BS from WINDOWS at that time
They simply didn't really care. If another OS was dominant, it is easy to argue that fundamental security issues could have been addressed in a better fashion, if management wanted it to be so.
To wit, this is the same era of computing that spawned OpenBSD. You can't say with a straight face that OpenBSD would have been brought down by oversized ping packets or be allowed to accept traffic out of the box like Windows was.
Even Win2K had that feature.
A little popup saying visit such and such site to stop your pc rebooting, and a countdown timer
Much more than that. With Windows 95, you could send an illegal ICMP with a simple "ping.exe -l 65510 victim.host.ip.address". Your Windows 95 might crash/misbehave after that, but not always.
The receiving end, the destination IP, on the other hand... These would panic, crash, dump, hang or reboot: Windows, MacOS, Netware, AIX, Linux, DEC Unix, Nextstep, OpenVMS, SCO Unix, HP-UX, Convex OS, Solaris.
It was very funny in the very first hours, the little toy Win95 machines obliterating all those big, expensive Unix servers on the network.
That was the precise moment when we started filtering ICMP echo on the routers. Hardly anyone did this before.
Ended up creating a "battleship"-like game. Two people, each trying to crash the other's machine. Since the IPs were randomly assigned by DHCP and for some inexplicable reason changed frequently (every day or so), we would be trying to guess what the other machine's IP was.
Given how they were physically arranged, we were able to see the machines blue screening (but not always fully crashing).
Of course, there was a lot of collateral damage as some machines were in used by people that weren't part of the 'game'. Thankfully, most of the time they didn't fully crash. Most of the time.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice
2: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/27/russian-zero-day-seller-of...
This person might have earned several hundred dollars each month for several months afterward. But opening their cdrom tray could have been fun too. He probably wishes he had thought of that.
"... to trigger the vulnerable code path, an application on the target must be bound to a raw socket."
Isn't that unlikely unless the victim runs a network capture tool like Wireshark or similar?
"death on flaxen wings"
The feeling of being able to chat with friends over nc was pretty powerful, though.