[geeks] ph-ux!

[Chris Byrne]

I just got done with an audit at a major Irish telecommunications company.
They had dozens of HP-UX systems exposed to the net, running the box-stock
configuration. No trusted configuration, no TCP wrappers, ACL's, no logging,
nothing. We could have rooted them in like ten minutes. Actually I was
amazed I didnt see any signes of previous compromise.

I asked them why and their response was classic "The vendor put them in, and
we can't touch them because we don't know how to do anything with them."

So just a few minutes ago a friend of mine who's an admin at a major US
universities CS department asked me to run a quick penetration of their
admin subnet. Guess what the first thing I see is? They have four completely
bone stock, unpatched HP-UX 10.20 boxes running all sorts of services, and
gee surprise suprise, they had already been compromised, several times, with
well known, already patched vulnerabilitites.

What was the reason given?

"The vendor put them in, and we can't touch them because we don't know how
to do anything with them."

Apparently there's a desperate shortage of HP-UX intelligence out there.

Of course considering even HP has been saying (quietly but determinedly)
that HP-UX is going to reach it's end of life soon, I wouldnt say its a
future proof career skill, but hell all of those cobol programmers made a
hell of a lot of money when they were the only ones left around who could
fix the old programs for Y2K.

Chris Byrne



-----Original Message-----
From: geeks-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:geeks-admin at sunhelp.org]On Behalf
Of Bill Bradford
Sent: 30 May 2001 20:05
To: geeks at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [geeks] ph-ux!


On Wed, May 30, 2001 at 08:50:49PM -0400, Michael Conlen wrote:
> Hahaha, installs hp-ux *and* has a wife. How do I somehow doubt that? :)

I do what they pays me to do.. Hell, I'd admin NT for $150K+ a year. 8-)

(actually, I stupidly admitted I knew hp-ux during the interview; my boss
 goes "OH!  good, i wont have to maintain those boxes then.." - so, nine
 months later, we finish the 11.0 "upgrade"..)

Bill

--
Bill Bradford
mrbill at mrbill.net
Austin, TX
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